ASUS GTX 750Ti OC
Value Award
RRP: $159.99 | Website: www.asus.com
Test Machine
• INTEL Core i7 4770K
• GIGABYTE Z87X-OC (F8)
• CORSAIR Dominator
Platinum 2x4GB DDR
2666MHZ CL10
• INTEL 730 480GB SSD
• Cooler Master Silent Pro M2
1500W
• Windows 7 64-bit SP1 (FW
337.50 13.12 beta)
I
t’s rare if ever we look at
mid-range GPUs here at
TheOverclocker, and we look
at entry level graphics cards
even less frequently. However,
given that in this issue, we
have the likes of the AMD APU,
AVEXIR Blitz memory and
some other budget orientated
components, the GTX 750 was a
fitting graphics card to review.
More than that, this just so
happened to be NVIDIA’s newest
GPU at the time, prior to the
release of the TITAN Black and
TITAN-Z, both of which aren’t
available in anything but their
reference form. Thus it falls
28 The OverClocker Issue 29 | 2014
on NVIDIA’s latest addition to
the 700 series of VGA cards to
essentially move us forward
or at least give us some idea
of what Maxwell GPUs are
about. This is particularly
important because on paper
the 750 Ti is weaker than the
650 Ti, but in practice it is at the
very least delivering the same
performance. In most cases it
is just faster, which is always
appreciated given that we are
dealing with an entry to bottom
mid-range graphics card here.
The ASUS GTX 750Ti is rather
simple, not really deviating
too much from the reference
card. It uses a 4-phase PWM,
Samsung HC03 GDDR5 memory
chips rated at 6GHz even though
the memory is operated at
5,400MHz like most 750 Ti
cards. Cooling is taken care
of by a large aluminum heat
sink with two low noise fans
on them. A black shroud with
the typical three red racing
stripes on it wrap up the visual
element. The PWM controller is
the standard uPI uP1608TK as
found on several other 750 Ti
cards. At the time of writing we
were not able to adjust voltages
on the card and this particular
sample remained at 1.187V in
full screen 3D mode, a little
less than the 1.2V we had seen
on another GTX 750 Ti card,
however with BIOS tweaking
you can get up to 1.21V. For
more, look to hard mods.
Doing the standard testing,
this card was obviously faster
than the reference card in all the
benchmarks and certainly in ingame benchmarks. The margin
by which it was faster varied
from title to title. Synthetic test
results always showed larger
differences in performance
than games, but then again this
is to be expected, given that
the factory overclock is rather
conservative on this card at just
1162MHz (real clock) under load.
If you’re not familiar with other
750 Ti models, there are some
that have a 3D clock that is just
over 1,300MHz. That doesn’t
mean however that you can’t
achieve the same thing with the
ASUS card.
The only thing that may get