ASUS ROG POSEIDON-GTX780-P-3GD5 G-SYNC Support GeForce GTX 780 3GB 384-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready Video Card

Pros: Very quiet and cool, even on air, at normal to mid-range loads. It has water cooling ability built in, which will cause temperatures and noise levels to drop greatly if used, especially at full loads, plus you don't have to spend money on an aftermarket water block or risk voiding your warranty. Extremely well-built, with a hefty back-plate to keep it rigid and help with component cooling. Easily outclasses my GTX 670 setup in the two benchmarks I tried (Unigine Valley and 3DMark Firestrike demo), scoring almost 50% higher in some areas. See Other Thoughts below for details and test results. Attractive appearance, with a slowly pulsating red ROG logo on the top edge. Green LEDs by auxiliary power sockets (8-pin and 6-pin) which turn red if your PCI-e cable is not plugged in correctly (a nice touch - the ASUS DirectCu II GTX 670 also has these). Streaming tool in the GPU Tweak software (I have not tried this yet). Came with free Watchdogs game coupon. Although my coupon had officially expired I was still able to redeem it and download the game. Stably powered in SLI by my 850W Seasonic PSU. Performed flawlessly in Kombustor stress testing and elsewhere, except for one glitch in one benchmark, which may be a driver issue (see next section).

Cons: There was a glitch when running the Unigine Valley benchmark, where occasional white flashes appeared on the screen - like lightning following the ground, as if it was trying, but failing, to paint a flat section of the landscape (not sure if this is a shader problem). Apparently other people have noticed this with 700 series cards, so perhaps it is a driver issue. Since it occurred with both of the Poseidons I tested, and they are unlikely to both be faulty, I hope this is the case. I never noticed it in the 3DMark tests, Kombustor, or any games. Price - All other GTX 780s cost less then the Poseidon (at time of writing), and some have faster clocks from the factory. Also, you could buy a GTX 780 Ti for less than $100 extra, although it might be of lesser build quality or cooling performance (even on air). You pay a premium for the Poseidon's extra features, and maybe the ROG branding.

Overall Review: It's quite a hefty, long card - check your case specs to see if it will fit, and make sure you screw it down securely at the case slot to avoid motherboard strain. Also be sure to plug in the auxiliary power connector to your motherboard if needed for running SLI. You'll definitely need it for more than 2-way. It's a shame the Poseidon doesn't come (as yet) in a Ti edition, but I think it was already in development before the 780 Ti was announced by nVidia. I was impressed by its performance compared to a fairly high end card from the previous generation (GTX 670, which performs close to a reference GTX 680 in some situations). Below are the results of the benchmark comparisons I mentioned earlier. [NOTE: I have 2 ASUS DirectCU II GTX 670s and tested them against 2 ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 780s in both single and SLI mode. Resolution was set to 1920x1080, native for my monitor] In SLI, the Poseidon came in the top 3% of recorded scores for the 3DMark Firestrike demo. This was in a rig with an i5-3570K CPU, mildly overclocked to 4.2 GHz on a Gigabyte GA-77X-UD5H mobo, with 16GB of Mushkin Blackline 1600 RAM. The graphics cards were not overclocked, and the Poseidons were not water cooled (that will come later, as will a more powerful CPU/mobo combination). Firestrike demo scores: GTX 780 (1) 8224 - better than 83% of all results GTX 670 (1) 5850 - better than 57% of all results GTX 780 (SLI) 12532 - better than 97% of all results GTX 670 (SLI) 8617 - better than 83% of all results Unigine Valley scores (Extreme HD preset, 8xAA): GTX 780 (1) - 62.6 FPS, Score 2620 GTX 670 (1) - 42.6 FPS, Score 1782 GTX 780 (SLI) 102 FPS, Score 4266 GTX 670 (SLI) 77.3 FPS, Score 3233 Noise levels between the two models were roughly the same across all loads and. quiet up to mid-loads, with temperatures up to high 70's C in the stressful benchmark sections. Even at high loads, fan noise was not objectionable and there was no whining. CONCLUSION: In my opinion, this card only makes sense to buy if you intend to water cool it, otherwise you are wasting money on a feature that will never be used. On the other hand, assuming you have that intent, you get a factory installed, integrated water block (saving you a lot of hassle and possible warranty issues), and potentially the ability to overclock better than its lower priced competition. Plus, it will look very nice in an appropriately-themed build, especially in an ASUS ROG rig. Because of its build quality, features, and attractive design, and despite the one glitch I encountered -- which I attribute for now to a driver issue -- I believe the Poseidon is worthy of a 5-egg rating. Peter L. 06/05/14

Pros: Temperature, look, graphics, Epicness

Cons: How dare you ask.

Overall Review: I love this card, I could barely bring myself to open the box when i got it, it was that beautiful. When the box finally did open, it came with just the basics, the card itself, an epic looking decal, and the driver Cd. Get this card if you want to see pure happiness on your monitor in the form of colliding pixels of wonderfulness. P.s. I may or may not have cradled this card like a child.

Pros: The price was great ($350) This card runs at 42c idle and 60c under 100% load. That is 17c cooler than the 6850's it replaced.

Cons: The 6850 came with nice cd wallets, and a bunch of swag. This one has nothing but the basics

Overall Review: I really like asus quality, and had my eye on a 290, but thankfully they put the 780 heat sink on it and the vrm has no direct cooling so I delayed purchasing it. Then this one went on sale, and I got a better card for less money. Hooray me!

Pros: I upgraded from an EVGA GTX 580 to this beast. It handles any game I throw at it on the highest settings without even going above 65c @ 80% fan speed. Final Fantasy XIV and Witcher 2 being two of the more graphically intensive games I own, this card manages to handle them without a problem at 60 fps, save for a few dips to 45ish on FFXIV when I'm in a main city and there are LOADS of people on screen. Without. Going. Above. 65c. Maybe I'm just so amazed by this because my previous card was pushing 88c on FFXIV, and would practically melt from the Witcher 2. Cooling and performance are both wonderful. I'm only using air cooling, by the way. Even on 100% fan speeds, this card is incredibly quiet. I tested the different fan levels from 30% to 100%, and man, I was pleased. Going from a GTX 580 that sounds like a jet turbine at 85%, I was more than happy with my purchase. But you seriously won't ever need to go above 80% fan speed with this card, and even that is probably too much. If you're looking for a card that can handle both current and future games, without spending over $400, this is the card to get. Even moreso if you have a rig with liquid cooling. Unfortunately I can't say if the stock fittings are any good, or if the liquid cooling works well. According to other videos and reviews, however, it seems very good.

Cons: The only real negative thing about the card that I can think of is the length. It's fairly long, however, only 1.5 cm or so longer than an EVGA GTX 580. If you don't have a full tower, there's a good chance this monster won't fit in your tower. Also, I got confused because you have to plug the PCI-E cables in upside-down, which isn't the case with my previous GTX 580. But that's literally just me being dumb. Not even a con. As you can see, it's hard to come up with cons for this card.

Overall Review: As for the free game, Borderlands: Pre-Sequel, there was another review saying that their game didn't ship with the card. The game is digital! When you buy the card, you get an e-mail with a code after the free "purchase" was made (when you bought the card). You input the code on EVGAs site, then you get another code to use on Steam. As for the actual game, I haven't even installed it yet. Too busy playing the games I already have that look incredible now ;-;

Pros: Price. Price. ROG branding, beautiful housing for card. It's a GTX 780. Price. Air/Liquid cooling. Price.

Cons: It's now an older series. Does not excel at liquid cooling nor air cooling. Would have rather seen even deeper discounts to the card rather than a free game. Or a credit to choose a game from a list.

Overall Review: At almost half the price that it was a month ago, the argument that the 780 is old has little weight. This was a $600 card that can now be had for under $350. It's only a month outdated; if you had bought this for $600 in august it would have been the latest and greatest, so these 780's are real steals, considering that they are on par with 970's and those are notoriously difficult to order right now. Honestly, this card has taken some hits about the liquid cooling, but it does what its intended to do well. It does provide better than air cooling, but it's obviously not as good as an EK waterblock. That's a given. EK waterblocks costs an extra $200, and require removing the current heatsink. This solution allows to reduce temps by 10-20 degrees if you decide to hook it up to a pump or buy an AIO that can be converted into a gpu AIO, such as the swiftech 220x. Don't be fooled by the 970 propaganda, the 780 is still a beauty, 3gb will be enough for everything but the most intensive games at 4k, and the prices are unbeatable as companies try to liquidate stock and compete with the 970's prices.

Pros: Fast, powerful, easy install.

Cons: Huge card! It barely fit in my Thermaltake Mozart Tx

Pros: Water cooled with factory warranty, ease of overclocking, and downright amazing with 2 in SLI mode. I have two of these in SLI for a graphics rendering/ gaming rig and the speed of them with a mild overclock just makes me giggle. I am using the factory preset overclock settings.

Cons: Not really a con but having to custom build the water cooling system

Overall Review: Antec 1900 full tower case Antec 1300watt PSU ASUS Rampage IV Black Intel 4930K running at 4.0 Ghtz 32G Gskill 2400Mhtz Samsung Pro 512G SSD 2x WD 1T Black HD 2x ASUS Poseidon GTX780 Koolance EXOS 1150 custom water cooling

Pros: This card is incredibly fast maxing out battlefield 4 with a frame rate consistantly over 60fps and this is only when clocked at 970 mhz , this card has a crazy overclocking headroom especially if watercooled

Cons: I found nothing bad about this card so far

Overall Review: I couldn't really find any guides on how to water cool this card. keep in mind i have never water cooled before so there is a forewarning curve