Raijintek Morpheus vs. DirectCU II - ASUS Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 05.08.14Page:
Conclusion
There is acutally one crucial reason why we chose the R9 290X for this test. This chip is known to become quite hot and to then start throttling. Equipped with the reference cooler the situation is even worse than with this version of the DirectCU II cooler, which is actually a powerful aircooler for graphics cards. Nevertheless, when we started to overclock the card we reached the the aircoolers limit - apparently. At this point we're going to walk you through the results gathered on previous pages and then add a few of our thoughts.Running the card at stock clocks shows, that when we equipped it with the Raijintek Morpheus scores were on average 1.3 percent higher than with the aircooler. This is actually already a solid hint, that the card started to throttle with the powerful DirectCU II aircooler, even at stock clocks. In the case of Bioshock: Infinite we see that the Morpheus-cooled card is pulling away by no less than 5.2 percent. When it comes to stock clocks we also had a look at two theoretical benchmarks, which are 3DMark and Unigine Heaven 4.0. In 3DMark the differences between Raijintek-cooled and DirectCU-II-cooled are tiny, but in Unigine Heaven 4.0 there is a 4.8 percent gap.
Once we started overclocking the cards, we noticed that 1150 MHz on the GPU and 1500 MHz on the memory were maximum stable clocks to run the card cooled with the DirectCU II aircooler. In order to show there is quite some additional potential still slumbering in the R9 290X cooler (when it receives evern more cooling) we overclocked the card a little bit higher. In this case we ran it at 1200 MHz GPU clocks and 1500 MHz memory clocks.
Let's discuss the overclocking results now. In 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme we see the scores increase by 6.4 percent in case of OC with the DirectCU II cooler and 11.4 percent when it comes to the Morpheus-cooled card. This means there is a 5.0 percent gap inbetween DirectCU-II-cooling and Morpheus-cooling, although the difference in overclocking is only 4.34 percent. When we run Unigine Heaven 4.0 we even notice that the result, in the case of the DirectCU-II-cooled OC tests, dropped below the non-OC value. This apparently shows there was some rather heavy throttling going on and the chip is constantly hitting the temperature target. The same card, equipped with Raijinteks Morpheus did not throttle at all and the performance goes up by 11.4 percent. Overall the DirectCU-II-cooled version is able to gain 8.7 percent performance with the overclocking and the Morpheus-cooled variant is 11.4 percent quicker.
On another note we had a closer look at temperatures. There is actually nothing much to say then the obvious. Even under full load and overclocked the Raijintek Morpheus-cooled card didn't get hotter than 74°C, whereas the DCU II version ran at 81°C.
Last but not least we want to add a few thoughts. Obviously, the DirectCU II cooler is already a well performing piece of hardware. Nevertheless Raijinteks Morpheus can beat the benchmarks set by ASUS's custom cooler. Considering the Morpheus equipped with two 120 x 120 x 25 millimeter fans blocks three expansion slots, and therefore it's substantially bigger than the DirectCU II cooler, we expected the Morpheus to perform better than the DirectCU II. Apart from that upgrading an ASUS DirectCU II card with an aftermarket cooler is definitely questionable, but what really makes sense is putting the Morpheus on a reference Radeon R9 290X. This will prevent the card from throttling and give you access to quite a bit more performance. Also overclocking headroom is apparently going to increase and on a reference R9 290X the 53 Euro, you'd have to pay for the Raijintek Morpheus, are money well spent.
We gave the Morpheus from Raijintek 4 out of 5 stars.
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