Technical data / specifications

With the ASUS GeForce GTX 660 DirectCu II Top you get a factory overclocked card with a custom PCB design as well as a DirectCU II v2 cooler. The manufacturer claims that this baby is 8 % faster than the reference design, 78 % cooler and 3 times quieter. Thanks to the factory overclocking, binned GPU, custom cooler and reworked PCB design we can kind of believe that (not the 78 % cooler part though).

Looking at clock speeds we see that the GPU runs at 1'072 MHz standard with a typical boost clock of 1'137 MHz. While the stock designed GTX 660 runs at 980 MHz with a boost of 1'033 MHz. Plus our sample was clocking itself up to 1'163 MHz which is 2x 13 MHz more than the specs. This time factory overclocking has been made also regarding the GDDR5 with a clock speed of 1'527 MHz (6'108 MHz effective) against nVidia's recommendation of 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective).

Now looking at the phycsical specifications of the DirectCU II Top version as said before ASUS reworked the PCB, binned the core and used their own GPU cooler. The DCU II Top gets 6 digital power phases and 3 POSCAP while the reference GTX 660 has only 4 analog phases and 1 POSCAP. You also find a lot of ASUS technology that helps to improve overclocking, power efficiency, noise reduction (less EMI), lifespan and so on. The DCU II Top version is powered by the DirectCU II cooler v2 (the v1 was crap if you ask me) which I literally love that features two 80mm fans with 11 blades each, three 6mm heatpipes and a red/black design. I was too lazy to count the fins and calculate the dissipation surface/power but trust me, it's big. So in other words to stay simple this graphics card is: Better, faster  and stronger.