NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 750 Ti unleashes the company's "Maxwell" architecture. It is a quantum leap forward in GPU technology, not because of its performance, but its performance with very little power consumed. NVIDIA has been hard at work fighting the biggest enemy of graphics technology today: power consumption. Every bit of power a graphics card consumes is turned into heat, which its cooling assembly has to dissipate, generating noise in the process. Power efficiency is also very important in today's mobile sector because it eats into your battery capacity. What makes NVIDIA's achievement even more impressive is that they did it without new GPU manufacturing technology. These first Maxwell GPUs are still built on a 28 nanometer production process - you'd typically see big efficiency improvements only when moving to a new process node, which would be the 20 nanometer process coming in late 2014. So take NVIDIA's improvements today and factor in additional improvements from a 20 nm production process and we could see a new breed of high-end NVIDIA GPUs with less power consumption than existing mid-range GPUs today (think of a 100 W Titan).
ASUS designed an overclocked GTX 750 Ti that includes an additional 6-pin power connector, which would make sense considering the GTX 750 Ti's power draw is right around that mark, so we should see additional performance gains from Boost 2.0 or overclocking. Unfortunately, ASUS's implementation seems completely redundant as it simply does not work as expected, but more on that later. Let's look at performance first. Thanks to the (relatively small) overclock out of the box, we see the card 3% faster than the NVIDIA reference design, which places the card slightly behind the HD 7850. It is also 5% slower than the GTX 650 Ti Boost and 12% slower than the Radeon R7 265. This means that the ASUS GTX 750 Ti OC is simply not the right card for serious 1080p gaming; you'd have to sacrifice too many detail settings to get decent framerates. For lower resolutions or older titles, the GTX 750 Ti is a good card, though. It is significantly faster than AMD's R7 260X. If you want real 1080p gaming, you should look at NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 660 and 660 Ti since both are still part of NVIDIA's product stack.
Let us now look at power/heat/noise. This is where the GTX 750 Ti really outshines everything on the market. As mentioned before, NVIDIA has improved power consumption, but I doubt anyone would have expected such a huge improvement. Work loads that previously required around 100 W are now handled by the GTW 750 Ti with a mere 52 W, which is almost twice as efficient. ASUS's GTX 750 Ti OC uses a bit more power due to design changes on the board and the increased clock speed out of the box, but the card is still more efficient than any older card on the market. ASUS is using a simple cooler without heatpipes or a copper plate, but that would be overkill while driving up cost. Nevertheless, the cooler is very quiet in both idle and during gaming, which would be useful in a living room PC or system you run overnight. I'm not sure if we really need two fans on a card like this as a single fan should have been enough and would have allowed ASUS to make the card a bit shorter.
Just like on most other GTX 750 Ti cards, overclocking on the ASUS GTX 750 Ti OC is restricted by NVIDIA's power limiter, which seems to engage at around the 75 W mark. I find this rather surprising because ASUS placed an additional 6-pin power connector on their card, which is in a terrible location by the way. It seems as though ASUS did not or wasn't allowed to configure their BIOS to take advantage of the additional power draw. As a result, we see similar GPU overclocking as on other GTX 750 Ti cards without a power connector. I also found memory overclocking on our sample to be quite limited, worse than other GTX 750 Ti cards using the same memory chips. So, even though the 6-pin power connector suggests superior overclocking capability, it doesn't work that way. I've tested other GTX 750 Ti cards that are better suited if you plan to overclock. Don't get me wrong, overclocking is not terrible as it still provides a good 10% real life performance increase, but I was expecting more.
I really like how ASUS configured their monitor outputs. They provide a full-sized HDMI output (for your big TV), two dual-link DVI ports (in case you want to use this card for a multi-monitor productivity system), and an analog VGA output (for users with older monitors). So far, this is the best output configuration I've seen on a GTX 750 Ti.
Right now, the ASUS GTX 750 Ti OC retails for $160. Only a $10 price premium over the reference design, I find the premium reasonable for just the card's improved noise and monitor output configuration. Still, the GTX 750 Ti's reference price is too high at $150, which has other cards offer a better price/performance ratio. The GTX 650 Ti Boost comes to mind, which you should be able to find for around $130, and AMD recently released their Radeon R7 265 retailing at $150, but it is neither as efficient or quiet as the GTX 750 Ti.