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This is a great time to be an AMD graphics fan. These 7000 series of cards just continue to impress and show that nVidia has a lot of work to do in order to catch up. With this kind of performance at this price, you really can’t go wrong with these new cards from ASUS. They are currently priced for about the same price as the reference cards. That may seem a bit strange, but ASUS realizes that with these set at the same price you really don’t have any reason not to purchase these over a reference based card unless they are just better designed. These ASUS DIRECT CU cards have a custom tuned fan that utilizes the fan as needed and throttles up or down accordingly as to the cards cooling needs. The fans actually shut off at one point on a cold night and that was pretty impressive and a bit freaky when you are not used to seeing that if you know what I mean.
We’ve seen these cards from a few different vendors now and some have had standard cooling and asome gave not. The ASUS HD 7770 isn’t as highly overclocked as some of the other cards that we reviewed previously, but it does offer superiour cooling and a totally non referance design. One thing to remember though is that these cards feature the respected ASUS name and feature set that puts them at the top of their class. These cards have proven to be no different in respect to all the quality Direct CU cards we have ever seen. One of the things about these amazing cards is that look as good as they perform. ASUS has been using this thermal design for a while now and there’s no question as to why, it works. These cards never once went above 50 degrees Celsius during our testing and you could hear the PSU fan over these cards while I was gaming and running tests. That’s pretty impressive and should also help to make these cards very popular. Without a doubt these cards are very well deserving of our Editor’s Choice Award here at Motherboards.Org. If you are a fan of AMD video cards then a pair of ASUS HD 7770 Direct CU cards is a serious gaming solution that costs under $400.00 and performs very well while staying cool without making hair dryer type sounds to stay that way. If you do not care about sound levels you can crank the fans up to full and you will have plenty of overclocking headroom in addition to what the card comes clocked at.
