Watercooled systems are a thing nowadays. Not only do they make you look cool (and refreshing!), but they also make your rig appear formidable. Getting on that bandwagon is the ASUS ROG Poseidon Platinum. As with all ASUS cards, there’re things that make this big black red slab special. There’s the looks, the performance, and the oh so awesome air/water cooling system. So, is it another luxury component or something that fits both budget and functionality?
Looks
As with every graphics card with an ROG moniker, the Poseidon sports the distinct red and black housing. But what makes it stand out from its high-powered siblings is its cooling system. The Poseidon takes its namesake from the Greek god of seas and it features a hybrid system of both air and water.
The Poseidon sports 2 G 1/4-inch threaded fittings for looping into the water system. Although it has this neat feature, sadly, we weren’t able to try it due to the absence of a readily available water-cooled unit.
Nonetheless, the card can still be tested via air-cooling. It sports two dust proof fans and as always, a very hefty and space-hungry body.
Performance
| Bench Buddy | |
| CPU | Intel Core i5 4670K |
| VGA | ROG GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum |
| Memory | 2 x 4GB Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer |
| HDD | WD10EZEX 1TB 64MB Cache |
| Motherboard | ASUS Gryphon Z87 w/ Armor Kit |
For testing, we employed a number of recent games to benchmark the Poseidon Platinum. Also, we tried running it through different benchmark applications for scoring and reference against other cards.
| GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum | ||||
| Min | Max | Ave | Settings | |
| Battlefield 4 | 51 | 90 | 44 | Ultra |
| Rome 2: Total War | 37 | 83 | 62 | Ultra |
| Far Cry 3 | 65 | 126 | 88 | Ultra |
| Titanfall | 60 | 19 | 62 | Ultra |
| Watch Dogs | 31 | 71 | 59 | Ultra |
| Wolfenstein: New Order | 59 | 60 | 60 | Ultra |
It’s an obvious fact that the Poseidon Platinum can run the latest games without flinching. I was able to pitch it up to the highest setting as possible in 1920×1080 resolution without significant frame rate drops.
If you’re more into gaming and into water loops, the Poseidon Platinum should well be in your list.
Unigine Heaven
“Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.”
3D Mark Firestrike
“Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today’s high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.”
3D Mark Firestrike Extreme
“3DMark Fire Strike Extreme is an enhanced version of Fire Strike designed for high-end multi-GPU systems (SLI / Crossfire) and future hardware generations.
In addition to raising the rendering resolution, additional visual quality improvements increase the rendering load to ensure accurate performance measurements for truly extreme hardware setups.“
3D Mark 11 Extreme
“3DMark 11 is a DirectX 11 video card benchmark test for Windows that is designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance. 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.”
Specifications:
| Graphics Engine | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 |
| Bus Standard | PCI Express 3.0 |
| Video Memory | GDDR5 3GB |
| Engine Clock | GPU Boost Clock : 1006 MHz |
| GPU Base Clock : 954 MHz | |
| CUDA Core | 2304 |
| Memory Clock | 6008 MHz ( 1502 MHz GDDR5 ) |
| Memory Interface | 384-bit |
| Interface | DVI Output : Yes x 1 (DVI-D), Yes x 1 (DVI-I) |
| HDMI Output : Yes x 1 | |
| Display Port : Yes x 1 (Regular DP) | |
| HDCP Support : Yes | |
| Power Consumption | up to 300W additional 6+8 pin PCIe power required |
| Accessories | 1 x Power cable |
| 1 x ROG Metal Sticker | |
| Software | ASUS GPU Tweak & Driver |
| ASUS Features | DirectCU H2O Series |
| OC Series | |
| Super Alloy Power | |
| Dimensions | 11.3 ” x 5.4 ” x 1.6 ” Inch |
| Note | Occupies 2 Slots |
Conclusion
With the cooling system, the formidable performance, and the striking looks, ASUS’ GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum has all the necessary things covered. Be it water or air, the card performs with flair. Also, the card get more on the practical side of things with its price as it bundles a water block and the card itself in one package. This saves you more as compared with shelling out for two different things, and leaving the research part (does it fit?) out of the equation. Thus making it efficient, budget-wise and performance-wise.
The sad part however is that is only available in the GTX 770 and GTX 780 variants, neither an AMD nor a 780Ti in sight.
It looks good, it’s sleek, and it’s fast. The GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum from ASUS gets a high mark in our site and in our hearts.
