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ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum (air) Review

Published by Christian Ney on 08.01.14

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The card

The DirectCU H2O cooler that comes with the Poseidon Platinum is an entirely new designed hybrid cooler, the first of its kind. The DirectCU H2O allows users to choose whether they want to chill their graphics card using air, water or even both at the same time. The cooler is made of three different parts, there is a vapor chamber, the fin stack and the face-plate with two fans. The vapor chamber is milled from copper and it's surrounded by an aluminium part that chills all the memory chips, the MOSFETs from the main power design and the core and memory voltage regulation chips via thermal pads. On top of that there are three nickel plated copper heatpipes - two with 6mm and one with 8mm diameter - that are connected to the vapor chamber and the aluminium fin stack. The fin stack which is being provided with fresh air via two 90mm fans. The fans carry the model number FDC10H12S9-C. The water channel that features standard G1/4" threaded fittings goes through the vapor chamber forming a U.
Overall the cooler is very well made. With the face-plate, it would have been a good idea if ASUS had put another screw roughly where the PCI-Express power plugs go because on our sample the face-plate was a bit loose (can be moved up and down). Comparing this face-plate with the one on the MARS 760 there is quite a difference in quality. We would have appreciated if ASUS was to use the same kind of material as on the MARS 760.
The thermal paste used is of pre-applied type.

Like most of ASUS' recent high-end cards the PCB has been completely reworked and the power design beefed-up. A closer look at it shows a 10 phase power implementation for the main power design where the GPU gets eight (there are five on the reference card) and the memory two phases. The PCB design is looking very much alike the one you get with the GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II. The card also features a full backplate to prevent bending and protect the card at the same time.

Component wise ASUS makes use of high quality, so called Super Alloy Power, parts. Last but not least, located at the rear of the PCB there are several voltage reading and modification points but unfortunately they are not labelled.

Checking the voltage regulation chip we find a digital multi-phase controller labelled Digi+ ASP1212 for the GPU, probably a rebranded CHiL 8228 or 8318, and one unidentified Richtek 2-phase controller labelled 02=FE A1B for the memory.