HD 6870 DirectCU Overview
At first glance ASUS’s HD 6870 DirectCU looks nothing like the reference design. This is mainly because of the cooling system ASUS employs. Like most of ASUS’s gaming products they use a black and red design, the shroud and PCB are black and the shroud has red accents. The shroud does not cover the entire card, but extends past the back of the card.
The DirectCU cooling solution is made up of a 3 8mm heatpipes that directly contact the GPU, much like many CPU coolers that we have seen. On top of the heatpipes you have a heatsink stack, which will dissipate the heat generated from the GPU and you have a fan to push it out of your case. ASUS claims this cooling design will increase the cooling power by up to 20% over the reference design.
Towards the end of the card you have your power connections. This card takes 2 6pin PCI-E power connectors. As I said the shroud extends past the end of the card a little bit, you can see that from the photo below. The card measures 11-inches long so keep that in mind.
This is a dual-slot card so you have quite a few different connections. You have 1x digital only DVI, 1x integrated DVI and 2 DisplayPort’s. There is also a small ventilation spot that should help out with cooling. If we flip the card over we can see there is a blackplate with heatsink fins that will help keep the entire card cool.
