Looking at the launch of the GeForce GTX 780 in retrospect, one of the more unusual aspects of the 780 was just how close NVIDIA let their lower-tier GK110 card get to the upper-tier GTX Titan. GTX 780 was able to deliver 90% of GTX Titan’s performance, but did so at just 65% of the price of GTX Titan.

Now a 10% performance gap is a fairly common gap for high-end NVIDIA cards. The price gap on the other hand is clearly wider than normal. For example, in the last generation the GTX 680 and GTX 670 were separated by roughly the same performance gap, but the GTX 670 came in at 80% the price of the GTX 680, not 65%. Ultimately NVIDIA’s “prosumer” positioning made Titan a very expensive card for gaming, with the end result being that the more strictly gaming focused GTX 780 could deliver very similar performance at a much lower price tag.

But the more interesting outcome of this performance/price disparity is how easy it is to close the performance gap against the much more expensive GTX Titan through overclocking. In the big picture 10% between tiers is almost nothing, and as we’ve already seen GTX 780 can more than make up that last 10% in overclocking. NVIDIA’s partners are of course well aware of this fact, and as the partners traditionally do, factory overclocked cards were a foregone conclusion. And with such a narrow gap between GTX 780 and GTX Titan, those factory overclocked cards should have little trouble matching GTX Titan.

Today we’re taking a quick look at one of those cards, EVGA’s GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked ACX. The 780SC ACX is a fairly traditional card for EVGA, filling in as the company’s standard first-tier factory overclocked card. With the GTX 780 Superclocked EVGA has rolled out two variations of this card, the first variation being an overclocked version of the reference card, and the latter being a semi-custom design with the company’s new ACX cooler.

Touching briefly upon the specifications of the 780SC ACX, the card is a fairly by-the-books factory overclock. EVGA has jumped the core clock from the GTX 780’s standard 863MHz to 967MHz, a 104MHz (12%) core clock increase. The official boost clock grows by even more – 120Mhz over reference – to 1020MHz. Memory clockspeeds on the other hand remain unchanged, leaving the card at 6GHz, making this a somewhat unbalanced overclock. However it's also one that’s largely tempered by the fact that the 384-bit wide memory bus of the GTX 780 provides plenty of bandwidth; after all this is the same amount of memory bandwidth GTX Titan has in the first place. The end result is that with few games being memory bandwidth limited, the 780SC ACX should scale nicely with clockspeeds.

EVGA’s design is a semi-custom design, pairing a standard reference board with their ACX cooler. Getting to the cooler momentarily, the board is otherwise unremarkable compared to other GTX 780s. The same voltage and power limitations apply here, so next to the factory overclock itself the biggest gains for the 780SC ACX come from the customary binning and reprogramming these cards go through. This means that the 780SC ACX runs at higher clockspeeds for any given voltage on the curve, improving performance without significantly increasing power consumption.

Moving on we have EVGA’s new ACX cooler, which is as much the star of the show for today’s review as the factory overclock itself is. EVGA isn’t a stranger to custom coolers, but their strongest hands have traditionally been their superbly supported reference cards, and their niche-in-a-niche products such as their Hydro Copper cards with pre-installed waterblocks or their extremely high-end Classified cards, neither of which is quite as mass market. EVGA has also offered alternative coolers at various points, but never as a principle product line.

However with their ACX cooler EVGA is looking to change that by branching to what’s loosely defined as the “branded custom cooler” market. This is a market which has seen the likes of Gigabyte, MSI, and others make a solid name for themselves by offering semi-custom and custom cards with branded coolers such as their respective Windforce and Twin Frozr coolers. Custom coolers are obviously by no means new, but the branding and reuse of the basic designs of these coolers have allowed the partners to make their coolers signature products for their respective brands in order to better stand out against both reference designs and competitors cards. Invariably open air coolers in design, these coolers offer a fairly well understood alternative to the blower designs most high-end reference coolers use, ultimately allowing partners to serve the preferences of buyers at both ends of the spectrum.

With that in mind, EVGA’s ACX cooler is a fairly typical entry for the custom cooler market, being based in principle in a twin fan open air cooler. This means we’re looking at a three part design: a baseplate for rigidity and heatsinking of smaller components, a heatsink that runs nearly the entire length of the card and is attached to the GPU via five aluminum heatpipes and an aluminum baseplate, and finally a pair of 90mm fans to provide airflow over the entire card. All in all it’s a common design principle for high end cards these days – thanks in large part due to the laws of physics – but it’s a common design that has proven to work well and makes some very straightforward and well understood tradeoffs in cooling performance versus noise. An open air cooler should deliver equal or better temperatures at lower noise levels, at the cost of shoving more of the cooling workload onto the chassis itself.

Meanwhile, though the basic design principles of the ACX cooler may be common, EVGA has a lot of latitude when it comes to construction, and this is where they’re hoping to separate themselves in the crowded field of branded custom coolers by building a better twin fan cooler. EVGA’s “secret sauce” here is largely in the design of their fans, with EVGA taking care to point out the design choices they made for both the blades and the motors. With respect to the blades EVGA says they’re using blades that are both stronger and lighter than what we typically see, though we don’t have the data the confirm this.

What should be more significant is EVGA’s use of ball bearings in the fan motors. Ball bearing fans are no more a breakthrough than twin fan coolers, however bearings are a seldom promoted item and as a result we rarely know what type of bearings are in use or when manufacturers switch between the bearing types. So consistently using ball bearings on all of their ACX coolers is if nothing else a promotional point for EVGA, as they’re a more expensive/premium option than sleeve bearings. Mechanically speaking, compared to sleeve bearings, ball bearings typically have greater longevity and a bit less noise under heavy load, in exchange for a bit more noise at idle, making them a good tradeoff for a high-end card. From a practical point of view the longer lifespan of ball bearings will be the greatest gain out of this, while any noise tradeoffs are secondary as the fan itself will usually be the greater factor. Of course EVGA’s specific numbers aren’t something we can validate, but the general benefits are fairly straightforward.

Moving on, as a semi-custom card the 780SC ACX is otherwise identical to the reference GTX 780. This means it has the standard NVIDIA display I/O configuration of 2x DL-DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort 1.2, and the same 10.5” length. Even the official TDP is the same at 250W, though as we’ll see in our testing there is a slight increase in power consumption at the wall.

Rounding out the package is EVGA’s usual collection of software and hardware accessories, including a pair of PCIe power adapters and a DVI to VGA adapter. As far as EVGA’s software goes there’s little to be said that we haven’t said before: EVGA still shares the gold standard for software, with their fantastic Precision X overclocking utility and their OC Scanner X artifact scanning utility.

Meanwhile, as with all of EVGA’s North American cards, the 780SC ACX comes with EVGA’s standard 3 year transferable warranty, with individual 2 or 7 year extensions available for purchase upon registration, which will also unlock access to EVGA’s step-up upgrade program. Finally, the MSRP on the card is $659, only $10 above the MSRP for the standard GTX 780. Though GTX 780 base pricing is by no means cheap, as we’ll see in our benchmarks $10 (2%) more for a 12% overclock and Titan-like performance renders the stock GTX 780 redundant almost immediately.

Gaming Performance

We won’t comment too much on performance here since the charts generally speak for themselves. EVGA’s 12% overclock isn’t a massive overclock, but it’s easily enough to push the card into a higher tier of performance. Compared to a reference GTX 780, the 780SC ACX is consistently ahead by 6-12% depending on the game, and with the exception of Bioshock it is within +/- 2% of GTX Titan. Out of the box, the only performance advantage GTX Titan would hold is in scenarios where more than 3G of VRAM is required, and at this point in time those are few and far between. In other words, we're looking at a GTX 780 with GTX Titan performance.

Power, Temperature, & Noise

Having seen the gaming performance of the card, let’s move on to power, temperature, and noise to get a better look at the performance characteristics of EVGA’s new ACX cooler. This will also give us a chance to evaluate the costs of EVGA’s factory overclock with respect to power consumption.

Briefly, since the 780SC ACX is a factory overclocked semi-custom card, other than clockspeeds there haven’t been any further board-level modifications by EVGA. The max voltage is still 1.1625v, with the 780SC ACX simply running at higher clockspeeds anywhere along the voltage curve.

With voltages going unchanged, power consumption is similarly unfazed. Load power consumption under BF3 increases by just 10W at the wall to 415W, and even then some portion of that is due to the increased CPU load to generate more frames. Looking at FurMark and its much more GPU-focused load, the 780SC ACX does even better at 2W less.

Given that the official TDP for GTX 780 is 250W, these small shifts in power consumption end up being just short of trivial. There is a minor power consumption increase due to the overclock, but with such a small increase the performance may as well be free. Especially in light of the fact that the 780SC ACX’s power consumption is still around 15W less than that of GTX Titan, owing in part to binning, and in part to the fact that the card has half as many GDDR5 memory chips as Titan.

Moving on to temperatures we finally get to see EVGA’s ACX cooler in action. We don’t have any other semi-custom GTX 780s on hand so we can’t make any proper comparisons to other open air coolers, but with that said the numbers we’re seeing here are consistent with a good open air cooler. Compared to the reference GTX 780 and its blower, the ACX cooler proves capable of pushing the card under 30C at idle, and meanwhile load temperatures are an impressive 15C below the reference GTX 780. In fact of all of the high-end cards in our lineup, it’s the coolest under FurMark at 69C.

Such strong cooling performnace delivers a side benefit for the 780SC ACX in the form of keeping it away from the GTX 780’s stock thermal throttle point of 80C. As the card never reaches 80C it never throttles based on thermal conditions, allowing it to hit higher clockspeed bins more often, thereby slightly boosting performance. Ultimately it’s still equally power constrained – which typically goes hand in hand with thermal constraints – but in the right scenarios it’s good for an extra bin or two.

Finally let’s take a look at noise. The GTX 780’s reference cooler was in part tuned for very good idle noise levels, so it’s not something that’s easily surpassed. In this case the 780SC ACX ends up being just over 1dB louder, an unsurprising outcome given the competition and the fact that twin fan open air coolers as a whole typically fall into this scenario.

Meanwhile load noise looks quite good. Based on our data it looks like EVGA has tuned the 780SC ACX to slightly favor temperatures over noise, but even so they’re still easily beating the reference GTX 780. This ends up being a 1.5dB advantage under BF3, while the more punishing (and ultimately worst case scenario) FurMark sees the card beat the reference GTX 780 by just under 6dB. Or compared to Titan the advantages are even greater, with a 4.4dB advantage to the 780SC under BF3 and a similar advantage under FurMark. In the end, unlike the 780/Titan reference cooler, the ACX cooler doesn’t need to significantly increase its fan speeds to handle the extra load presented by FurMark, which is why we see noise levels almost identical between that and BF3.

Ultimately EVGA’s ACX cooler performs very well under load, which is no less than what we’d expect given the design and EVGA’s expertise in the matter. Like other open air coolers, the ACX cooler provides lower temperatures and lower noise levels than the equivalent reference blower, delivering Titan-like performance for under 47dB. Of course it goes without saying that this is a tradeoff; an open air cooler pushes more of the cooling load onto the chassis itself, so while the ACX cooler is highly effective in a large, airy case like our Spedo, it’s generally not the best choice for small and/or low airflow scenarios, those scenarios being where the reference blower best excels.

Overclocking

Having taken a look at stock performance, let’s dive into overclocking quickly. Since the 780SC ACX is based on the reference board design it has the same limits as the reference GTX 780 when it comes to overclocking. The max TDP is just 106%, and the max voltage is 1.2v. As a result overclocking headroom won’t be very different from the reference GTX 780, with the ACX cooler and EVGA’s superclocked binning being the only significant differences from a reference card.

In the end even with binning in play the 780SC ACX isn’t capable of overclocking any higher than our reference GTX 780; in fact it’s a hair worse, with the 780SC ACX topping out at 19MHz less than the reference GTX 780. So from a clockspeed perspective this is a wash. Pushing any higher will require more TDP headroom and more voltage, which in turn will require a fully custom design.

At the same time given the fact that EVGA has already eaten into a lot of the GTX 780’s overclocking headroom with their factory overclock, this means there’s not as much overclocking headroom available for the end user. 967MHz to 1042MHz is still a free 8% increase in clockspeeds; the payoff just isn’t as great as relative to a stock GTX 780.

Moving on, as a result of their similar overclocks, overclocked performance is virtually indistinguishable from our overclocked GTX 780. Despite the ACX cooler keeping temperatures in the low 70s we’re primarily power constrained here, which isn’t something the ACX cooler can help with.

As was the case with overclocking the reference GTX 780, the payoff here is GPU performance that’s well ahead of the GTX 780 at stock, and performance that exceeds even GTX Titan by around 7%.

Finally, quickly taking a look at power, temp, and noise after overclocking we can see that the 780SC ACX maintains its strong cooling performance, with temperatures topping out in the low 70s and noise levels rising by just 1dB. The power cost of overclocking is fairly high however, thanks to the use of higher voltage boost bins.

All told, the 780SC ACX’s sweet spot is going to be at stock. While it’s as good an overclocker as any reference GTX 780, the fact that EVGA gives you so much of its overclockability out of the box with a trivial power cost means that the benefits of squeezing out the last bit of headroom don’t pay off quite as nicely here as with a stock card. The ACX cooler will have no problem keeping temperatures and noise levels down however, which means being able to reap the benefits of GTX 780 overclocking without the noise penalty.

Final Words

Wrapping things up, it’s clear that EVGA has put together an extremely solid card with their GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked ACX, both on the basis of performance and relative value. As we alluded to at the start of this article, EVGA is offering a sizable factory overclock for an absolutely tiny price premium, and as a result the 780SC ACX looks extremely good on a price/performance basis. For $10 more than a stock GTX 780 the 780SC ACX delivers 10% better performance, does so with just a trivial increase in power consumption, and ultimately closes the performance gap with GTX Titan. On this basis the 780SC ACX is a much better value proposition than your typical factory overclocked card, to the point where the stock card rarely makes sense. For all practical purposes the stock GTX 780 has been rendered redundant because of this.

Clockspeeds and prices aside, the other matter at hand is EVGA’s new ACX cooler. As yet another twin fan open air cooler the ACX cooler isn’t going to be groundbreaking, but that hasn’t stopped EVGA from taking the basic principles of the design and put together a very solid cooler. The build quality itself is quite good, and although this doesn’t match the metal madness that is the reference GTX 780, the ACX is as sturdy as any open air cooler can hope to be. Meanwhile in making the usual tradeoffs that come with the design, the ACX cooler offers notably better cooling than the GTX 780’s reference cooler, sustaining lower temperatures and less noise than its blower based counterpart. It goes without saying that for systems that can support this style cooler this is a very good tradeoff to make.

With that in mind, EVGA is off to a good start with their new cooler. If EVGA can sustain this level of quality and performance across their product tiers, then EVGA should have no trouble at all achieving their goals and broadening their reach into open air cooling.