ASUS 7970 DirectCU II available now

Eluder79 said:
It actually is on their website.
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If that's it, then it's the worst documentation I've ever seen - it's hardly visible even though I know exactly what I'm looking at. Also, I don't tend to look to product promotional literature (which is really what that page is) for operating instructions. You would think that would be in the download or support section of the page, like where you would normally find a manual. Like this
 
just received my card yesterday it crashed on me 5 times so far, gpu at idle is 45c and vrms been at 64-68c idle but i came over to computer and saw vrm temp jump to 32736C (using hwinfo64) i think im using 12.2 drivers. is that a possibility why its been crashing? i played bf3 single display yesterday for 1 hour without crash. also running it stock
 
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Neon01 said:
If that's it, then it's the worst documentation I've ever seen - it's hardly visible even though I know exactly what I'm looking at. Also, I don't tend to look to product promotional literature (which is really what that page is) for operating instructions. You would think that would be in the download or support section of the page, like where you would normally find a manual. Like this
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Agreed, still lousy documentation, but I guess Asus feels it's enough. :confused:
 
gustav88 said:
5 in stock at CompSource.com for $582 w/ free shipping, plus $5 off with coupon googmap

5 also in stock at ElectronicsShowplace.com for $583.99 w/ free shipping

Haven't personally done business with either of them, but they get good reviews on resellerratings and google checkout. I almost ordered one from compsource but newegg got some stock before they did and was able snag one so I cancelled.
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Anyone want to comment about these two places? Safe?
 
techf1end said:
just received my card yesterday it crashed on me 5 times so far, gpu at idle is 45c and vrms been at 64-68c idle but i came over to computer and saw vrm temp jump to 32736C (using hwinfo64) i think im using 12.2 drivers. is that a possibility why its been crashing? i played bf3 single display yesterday for 1 hour without crash. also running it stock
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that is just a temp reading error nothing to worry about i have seen it myself not sure if it was due to other monitoring software interfering or newer drivers that i am nolonger using due to problems i have gone back to the disk driver despite being a bit slower you may want to do the same and see if it still crashes
 
EarlyAdopter said:
Sure enough. 1.5 hours into playing SWTOR at stock 1000/1400 and the card froze up. Screen full of vertical bars and system hard hung.

And now I'm getting artifacting and display driver crashes on the desktop. The card is getting progressively worse. Must have a bad component that's slowly dying.

Sad. It was a nice 48 hours with the card. Sure love the quiet cooler, and no tearing on 3 screens. Now, to RMA it with Asus, or just return it Amazon and wait for the MSI Lightning...
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Seeing so many reports of other people having problems with this card here and elsewhere I decided to just return it and go for a MSI Lightning.

Pre-release shots of the MSI Lightning show a solid plate for RAM+VRM cooling, which I hope connects to the main cooler like the reference cooler. And it has what look to be higher end mosfets and capacitors, so perhaps reliability will be improved.

Sad Asus dropped the ball here.
 
EarlyAdopter said:
Seeing so many reports of other people having problems with this card here and elsewhere I decided to just return it and go for a MSI Lightning.

Pre-release shots of the MSI Lightning show a solid plate for RAM+VRM cooling, which I hope connects to the main cooler like the reference cooler. And it has what look to be higher end mosfets and capacitors, so perhaps reliability will be improved.

Sad Asus dropped the ball here.
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I've gone back to letting the videocard decide fan speeds with my 7970, fan only goes up to 28%, GPU gets to 65c which is nothing, and VRM's get to 96c, only a 5c difference from fans being at 55% before
 
dasa said:
that is just a temp reading error nothing to worry about i have seen it myself not sure if it was due to other monitoring software interfering or newer drivers that i am nolonger using due to problems i have gone back to the disk driver despite being a bit slower you may want to do the same and see if it still crashes
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thanks for the info i wasnt sure, first time ive ever seen that happen. went back to drivers on cd and sure enough no crashes i can tell it is a bit slower but nice not to crash in the middle of doing something lol. :D kinda sucks newegg dropped the price down after i bought one though all well im happy
 
svideo said:
Has anyone here tried setting this up in crossfire with a non-Asus reference 7970? I have a pair of Sapphire 7970 reference cards, and I really could use the extra DP ports as I am currently unable to enable HD3D + Eyefinity without them. I'm thinking of eBaying one of the cards if I could somehow turn on Crossfire with this guy and one of my existing cards.

Would this be possible?
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I am also interested if this is possible... anyone did this yet ?

Thank you !
 
I just read a review on newegg that says he called asus about his DCUII not functioning, and they told him it is required to use a pci-e 3.0 slot. I was wondering if anyone has been able to make it work on 2.0? I would be very disappointed if this is the case as I just ordered mine from newegg a couple days ago when it was in stock. :confused:
 
Sounds like he got an idiot of a rep. PCIE 3.0 isn't required for any card yet, and is only enabled if you have a compatible mobo and cpu.
 
Lol yah that would be committing suicide for a card company considering most everybody doesn't have PCI 3.0 yet. That rep was a step below clueless.
 
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=1020682

Some users have reported abnormally high VRM temperatures which I inquired about with Asus. They informed me that the readings are incorrect. This is a direct quote:


Quote:
After our internal testing, the temperature of VRM is normal but the software reading doesn’t reflect the real temperature within a specific range.

This phenomenon happens because the resistance of the related resistor holds a non-linear relationship with the real temperature.
cidimage002jpg01cd004d.jpg
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I want to quickly point out that the MSI 7970 Lightning has only single link DVI output (two of them)... it might or it might not affect you... If you have any 30 inch without displayport (with DL DVI), then Asus is the only way to go (in my case I need the other 3 displayports for 3 x 120MHz 1080p).
 
aandea said:
I want to quickly point out that the MSI 7970 Lightning has only single link DVI output (two of them)... it might or it might not affect you... If you have any 30 inch without displayport (with DL DVI), then Asus is the only way to go (in my case I need the other 3 displayports for 3 x 120MHz 1080p).
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and i have the same problem with the one dl-dvi on both my asus drietCUII would not work fully with my HP LP3065 was getting artifacting bad

had to use a adapter from one of the displayports
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815158198

now it is fine, only cost me a extra 120 bucks :mad:

on the VRM temps i didn't take off the back plate but i vave been watching for hot spot with a laser thermometer and did not find any
back plate over the VRM's never goes over 110f or 44c
if they were 110c+ i think it would radiate to the backplate more
 
So if the vrm's are not actually melting why are all these cards crashing and so buggy??
 
Not all the cards are bad.
My card was fine upto 1175/1700MHz at default volts (1.174) and with the above note, I guess we can now relax since the VRM temps really aren't getting all that hot.
 
Mine doesn't crash nor is it buggy :\ I'm not just saying it to justify my purchase, I have no problem taking a $100 loss by selling my hardware way below cost and getting something else, but I haven't found a reason to do so despite all the doom and gloom. My card is very quiet, cool and haven't had any crashing in any games (which has been BF3 about 75% of the time) and it's running at 1125mhz w/vcore at 1020mV. Very happy with my purchase.
 
QwaarJet said:
Mine doesn't crash nor is it buggy :\ I'm not just saying it to justify my purchase, I have no problem taking a $100 loss by selling my hardware way below cost and getting something else, but I haven't found a reason to do so despite all the doom and gloom. My card is very quiet, cool and haven't had any crashing in any games (which has been BF3 about 75% of the time) and it's running at 1125mhz w/vcore at 1020mV. Very happy with my purchase.
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I have to agree. Sadly, I'm first-hand proof that at least some of the posts in this thread reporting bugs or issues with the cards are simply user error. I'm sure that a good amount of the others are just people trying to overclock too aggressively for the capabilities of their card.

Granted, there are a handful of just plain bad cards, like some of the cases where they're crashing at stock clocks without any tweaking. Overall though, I think that a lot of the complaints may be due to people expecting these cards to overclock better (on average) than the reference cards. This does not seem to be the case. So it's a story of elevated expectations yielding too-high overclocks in the install base, and therefore, the appearance of lots of crashes and bugs.
 
Neon01 said:
I have to agree. Sadly, I'm first-hand proof that at least some of the posts in this thread reporting bugs or issues with the cards are simply user error. I'm sure that a good amount of the others are just people trying to overclock too aggressively for the capabilities of their card.

Granted, there are a handful of just plain bad cards, like some of the cases where they're crashing at stock clocks without any tweaking. Overall though, I think that a lot of the complaints may be due to people expecting these cards to overclock better (on average) than the reference cards. This does not seem to be the case. So it's a story of elevated expectations yielding too-high overclocks in the install base, and therefore, the appearance of lots of crashes and bugs.
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Yeah HardOCP just did the review of the 7970 lightning, and even they black marked it because it couldn't hit overclocks higher then 1200mhz or higher then 1500mhz with the ram

Meanwhile my Asus Direct CU II 7970 is doing 1125/1575 with stock voltage, no issues, put in over 20 hours of gaming so far with zero issues

Its a giant crapshot on how good a card is going to perform, some will overclock amazingly high, other's won't. Hell I put 6 hours into Tera online, a game everyone said was crashing their cards, and I had zero issues

EDIT: Also somebody posted it, I TOLD you all it was probably an error in the sensor reading, and I was right, like I said earlier its using a non-reference design VRM, and all the temperature monitoring programs were reporting it wrong because it has a different sensor readout

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=1020682

Hell Piccy reports my mobo temperature as 120C!!!! HWinfo/Aida64 etc reports my CPU temperature at idle as being 43c, when BIOS and Coretemp reports my CPU as 45c min, 67c max. These are ALL wrong, Asus Thermal Radar reports 29c idle, 55c full load, temps I can verify with my thermal gun. This is why I own a thermal gun when building PC's to check for heat issues, you can't rely on sensor readings solely

So at last we all know there is nothing to be scared about, finally. As for other people having issues, I dunno, sometimes we get lemons. I bought a Saphire card that lasted half a week before the fan died, replaced it with a HIS which everyone "Warned" me about, and that's still going today in my bit torrent PC for six years -STRAIGHT- power on
 
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Well, it's good to know the VRM temps are being read incorrectly and aren't really running hot.

It really sounds like this card and the MSI R7970 Lightning are close enough where it doesn't matter which one you pick (assuming DVI-D isn't an issue). Is that a fair assumption?


Also, if I'm looking to hook 4 monitors (1680x1050 res each) to this, can I get away with using the cheaper display port -> DVI cables I see on monoprice, or am I stuck buying the $120 variant linked earlier?
 
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On a slightly different matter; I saw screenshots of Asus' GPUTweak on a 'vanilla' Asus 7970 showing a Memory voltage slider. On my DCII it does not show a memory voltage slider. I can hardly believe something so tweakerish would be on the plain version but not on the one version that should have it in the first place.
Any ideas?
 
I think you're right, but with MSI AB you have the voltage tweak, and IMHO, it's way better than Asus' GPU Tweak.
 
aandea said:
I am also interested if this is possible... anyone did this yet ?

Thank you !
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Hi There,

Yes i have 2x 7970 Saphhire reference cards and a ASUS 7970 DCUII card in Trfire mode, what would you like to know?

had to remove the ASUS card though due to putting the machine under water recently and since there isnt a waterblock available yet for it.....um yeh waiting patiently for it.
 
I ordered a thermal gun just for shits and giggles, should arrive tomorrow to see how my DCII with backplate cutout VRM temps read.... well at least the back of them :\
 
I flip-flopped quite a bit through this low-stock period. Said I would wait for the MSI 7970 Lightning because I thought by the time I was actually able to get the Asus DCUII the MSI would likely be available anyways.

But I got the NewEgg e-mail yesterday and was able to grab one in stock. Shipped today and should be here in a few days. Also went to Monoprice and ordered 4 DisplayPort cables. Excited that I can finally get my 5x1 landscape setup up and running.
 
Yah I can't say I wasn't tempted because it actually stayed in stock for a while. I just couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger this close to the Kepler launch. I got a feeling the prices may come down shortly afterwards.
 
Am I understanding it correctly that the EK DCII block will only allow fittings facing downward, requiring me to let the coolant flow make a complete 180 before I can hook it up to the rest of my setup????
 
Tijgert said:
Am I understanding it correctly that the EK DCII block will only allow fittings facing downward, requiring me to let the coolant flow make a complete 180 before I can hook it up to the rest of my setup????
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Yes this seems correct from the info they gave out. It really messes up my setup if I end up getting this waterblock. I was looking forward to this so much but this is a bummer
 
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