Stock Performance

First things first, we wanted to take a look at the stock performance of the ASUS Poseidon GTX 780.  Of course, with the standard clock speed of this card set at only 90 MHz higher than that of the reference cards based on the same GPU, performance should still be pretty close.  For a true performance comparison you'll want to keep reading for our overclocked results in the coming pages.

Testing Configuration

The specifications for our testing system haven't changed.

Test System Setup
CPU Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E
Motherboard ASUS P9X79 Deluxe
Memory Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 16GB
Hard Drive OCZ Agility 4 256GB SSD
Sound Card On-board
Graphics Card ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 780 3GB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB
AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB
AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB
Graphics Drivers NVIDIA: 335.23
AMD: Catalyst 14.2
Power Supply Corsair AX1200i
Operating System Windows 8 Pro x64

 

Frame Rating: Our Testing Process

If you aren't familiar with it, you should probably do a little research into our testing methodology as it is quite different than others you may see online.  Rather than using FRAPS to measure frame rates or frame times, we are using an secondary PC to capture the output from the tested graphics card directly and then use post processing on the resulting video to determine frame rates, frame times, frame variance and much more. 

ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 780 Graphics Card Review - Cases and Cooling 2

This amount of data can be pretty confusing if you attempting to read it without proper background, but I strongly believe that the results we present paint a much more thorough picture of performance than other options.  So please, read up on the full discussion about our Frame Rating methods before moving forward!!

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The ASUS card running at a base clock speed of 1080 MHz is just a bit faster than the reference card from NVIDIA but does move into the realm of the R9 290X with Crysis 3.

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GRID 2 sees a nice jump going from an average frame rate of about 69 FPS to 77 FPS – an increase of 10%.

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Metro: Last Light was also a bit faster with the ASUS Poseidon at stock settings.

As expected, none of the results on this page are particularly enlightening or surprising. With a fairly modest overclock on this over-engineered graphics card, I can't help but wish that ASUS would have tweaked things a bit more for those users that don't want to manually overclock on their own. I realize to some that may seem like sacrilegious talk, but those types of gamers (with money, without time) actually do exist. 

But enough of this standard testing, the real reason to buy a card like the Poseidon is to overclock it!

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