Take note that the test setup is a run in a closed but in the well ventilated SilentiumPC chassis, temperatures could differ from enclosure to enclosure. Secondly for the temperature results of the EK Full Cover block, consider that the Intel i7-4770K is running at 4500MHz at 1.2Vcore, thus also contributing for a with a little extra heat in the loop.

First up the Stock Temperature results of the ASUS triple slot air cooler versus the Full Cover EK water block. The test was conducted at stock speeds of the ASUS DirectCII OC GTX 780 Ti card (954/1750).

Take note that the ASUS cooling solution keeps the factory Overclocked card way cooler then the reference 780Ti we also have in the [M] lab. Maxing out at 69°C with 954MHz on the core versus 81°C with the core at just 876 MHz for the reference model. Not even talking about the noise production of the reference model measured at 54dBA versus 35dBA of the ASUS dual slot solution. When comparing the ASUS Air cooling solution versus the EKWB Full Cover Water block we see a small gain at idle of a mere 2°C. After running 3 loops of the 3DMARK Vantage test, GPU-Z logged a maximum GPU temperature of 36°C, of course in favor of the EK water cooling block.

Instead of conducting further tests with the synthetic Vantage benchmark, Madshrimps opted to go more real life scenario wise. As your humble reviewer is an avid FPS multiplayer nOOb, what game better then Battlefield 4 from Dice to trash the graphic card. Usually graphics cards tend to do a lot worse in raw MHz with this FPS shooter then in all sorts of synthetic benchmark applications.

Without touching the voltages in Afterburner, we tested for 100% gaming stability in Battlefield 4.

Stock our ASUS GTX780 Ti card runs at 954 MHz, we slowly moved the MHz slider and played several multiplayer maps on BF4. On air we maxed out at 1015MHz . With the EK water cooling Full cover block 1045MHz was rock stable again without any voltage addition. Moving upwards required adjusting the voltage slider more. In fact we could run up to 1060Mhz, though irregular artifacts and/or desktop crashes started.

Test two consisted of upping the vGPU (+75mV) and boosting the power limit to 110%. On water we ran out of steam at 1115MHz (1215MHz boost) and 1850MHz on the RAMs. On air we walled at 1050MHz (1139MHz boost)  at +60mV. More voltage ( +75mV) didn’t help to squeeze out more MHz on air. This is far as our sample card gets for rock solid hardcore gaming. Now any lockup is extremely annoying, especially during high ticket maps, so better back down 15-25MHz.

Take note that overclocking headroom differs from card to card. Oldscarface, a team member has one of the ASUS 780Ti Matrix cards and it can easily bench (read not game stable) at close to 1350MHz boost speed on the Matrix air cooler and +1400 on water, something which by far could not be possible on our particular DCII OC card.