Moving up towards higher-performance cards, we have this entry from Asus, the GTX 760 - or to give it its full title, the GTX 760 DirectCU II OC Mini. It's a very capable card and, but it’s also one that's nearly £200. But is it worth that amount?
The GeForce 760 GPU used here is from the GK104 processor line, as featured in the slightly older GTX 680 model. One of the main features of this GPU is the Nvidia Boost Technology, which takes into consideration the current temperature, power and the graphical load on the GPU, then boosts it as it sees fit, but keeping within the limit of the card's tolerance.
The core clock is 1006MHz, with the boost in ideal conditions moving it up to 1071MHz, a 4% increase on the standard GTX 760. Additionally, there are 1152 shading units, 96 texture mapping units, a TDP of 170W and 2GB of GDDR5 memory at 1502MHz.
It's a dual-slot card but one that's slightly smaller than the norm, hence the Mini aspect of its full title. The smaller footprint allows it to be fitted into a mini-ITX case, but it's certainly not lacking in power and performance.
Connectivity comes in the form of a pair of DVI ports, a single HDMI and a single DisplayPort. Since we're now in the realms of the more powerful graphics cards, it's lacking a VGA port. Legacy users may well be cut out from the equation here, but at least other users will relish in the fact that triple-monitor computing from a single card is now possible. And the two available SLI connectors mean you can splash out considerably more and enjoy some quad-SLI graphical wonder.
The 3DMark score of 8640 means you could probably throw any game going at this card on its maximum settings, and it'll quite happily take it. In fact, we'd be surprised if you didn’t hit the semi-magical 60 frames per second on any of the games you play with this card. Suffice to say, it's more than capable of high-end gaming.
Naturally, then, standard desktop duties, as well as photo and video editing, are nothing the GTX 760 needs to get worked up over. We're only amateur video editing enthusiasts, and everything we tested it with worked a treat, so we'll go out on a limb and say it's likely that the GTX 760 can take on something more professional looking.
Despite its obvious power and performance, we didn't much like the amount of noise that was dished out from this thing; it was significantly louder than anything else we'd tested so far. You would assume that this amount of power will create more heat, so the large 100mm fan will work more. However, the DirectCU II dual-blade setup, along with its vapour chamber, is supposed to lessen the noise levels, but it doesn't.
That aside, this is a terrific card, but it's also one that costs on average £194. That isn't cheap, but you do get some great capabilities for your money, and with this being able to fit into a mini-ITX case, there's plenty of scope for an amazing gaming and media PC.