Asus and NVidia paired together and held a small little community event in Ibis in Bencoolen Street which is a stone's throw away from Sim Lim Square. I happen to be the lucky one to actually be selected as one of the 100 Gamers invited for this small gathering there. The purpose of this one is for the guys to share and introduce the new Graphics Cards / Video Cards which incorporated the best of Asus and NVidia had to offer.
ASUS were up in arms with their non-reference GPU cooler in the form of the Direct CU II Cooler. The Direct CU II TOP cards are just factory overclocked versions of the card. I've been hearing this a lot especially from the likes of Elric Phares from Tech Of Tomorrow and Linus from Linus Tech Tips and NCIX. Whereas for nVidia, they introduced the Kepler 28nm architecture for their GeForce 600 series of GPUs. This architecture compared to the last generation Fermi Architecture is said to be more power efficient and combines better performance per watt.
To stay on top of their game software-wise, ASUS released their GPU Tweak software which is in a nutshell a combo of an expanded tweaking of MSI Afterburner and Monitoring of GPU-Z. NVidia did their part by allowing GeForce Experience go Open Beta which allows you to get optimal settings for games by factoring your GPU and CPU. It only works with an nVidia GeForce based GPU, not AMD Radeon.
Following Photographs show some of the pictures that I took with my Samsung Galaxy S3.
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| Outside the TASTE Restaurant at Ibis |
As always I always tend to turn up especially early for the every event there is. You might say I'm always kancheong but in truth I always value punctuality rather than getting late.
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| ASUS's mini ITX PC. |
A Build that is perfect for the budget gamer and the space shy people. This packs an i5 3570 non-K processor, 8 Gig RAM, 1TB Hard Drive, a GTX 650 (Direct CU II), and an ITX board. All this is powered by a 520W 80+ Bronze CoolerMaster Power Supply and housed in the CoolerMaster Elite 120 ITX Case. But in truth you could easily power a GTX 660 Ti and a GTX 670 should you see fit. I would have loved to test it but no net connection lol. I did overclock the 650 a tiny bit. Peripharels come in the form of a CM Storm Quickfire TK and a Sentinal Advanced II Mouse and a SteelSeries Diablo III/Asus Mousepad.
The CM Line of products and peripherals which include the CM Storm Keyboards and various mice also from Cooler Master. I already own one of those Keyboards, just the tenkeyless and non-backlit version in the form of the CM Storm Quickfire Rapid. I will definitely recommend you guys to give CoolerMaster's range of keyboards a try if you hadn't done so yet.
Best of Asus, Nvidia and CoolerMaster Build. This is pretty much decked out with an overclocking ready CPU (i5 3570K) although it's best to have an i7 3770K in there for the best, but i5s ain't too shabby. GTX 680, 16GB RAM, OCZ Vector 256GB SSD, P8Z77 Motherboard, AIO Water-cooling 120mm Radiator, what more you want?
Hugo from Taiwan explaining the features of the new 28nm Kepler process from nVidia. He does know his stuff, but I feel a lot better if the speaker can really speak fluent English like how Local Singaporean Teenagers and Youths do. Frankly, I know quite abit too much since I watched plenty of GTX 600 series videos on YouTube when they first rolled out the line of GPUs.
A Close-up shot of the best of Asus Build. You can see the Direct CU II nVidia GTX 680 quite clearly as well as the radiator and the motherboard.
One of the rigs setup there. I gotta tell ya, I was kinda sad about the build. Because you do have an overclocking ready i7 3770K on board, yet you have a really wimpy GT 640 in there. You could have done so much more if you put something like a GTX 660Ti or GTX 670 which is what I would have done. I did try playing BattleField 3 on this rig, and it was kinda struggling badly with textures at Ultra and the rest auto set to Medium. If you want that big performance, take a look at my PNY GTX 680 video
here. And did I say my CPU is just an older i5 2500K?
One of the freebies that came with the bag, the NVidia and ASUS Republic of Gamers Shirt, alongside the Intel Extreme Masters shirt I wore that night.
I managed to get this SteelSeries Diablo III / Asus Edition Qck MINI mousepad from Hugo for answering a question there. As you can see, the feel is very similar to my other SteelSeries Qck MINI black that I've been using for a little while now.
Thanks Hugo!
Here's my current complete gear:
