Asus is not only known as our founder’s favourite brand, but also as an incredibly popular and world wide renown company due to their highly efficient quality products. Lately the web has been buzzing about AMD’s HD 7970 getting custom cards from partners, and it was only time before this new GPU got its own Asus signed makeup.
Makeup? Make that a workout, Asus took out the DirectCu II treatment for this occasion, and the first pictures have emerged including some specifications.
Once again, this new product takes quite a nice amount of space, three expansion slots are needed to fit the beast inside the computer. The cooling is taken care of by a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink covering the various hotspots of the card to which the heat from the GPU is directed by six heat pipes making direct touch with the GPU itself. Two 100 mm fans make sure to evacuate the most heat possible, all of this covered by the stylish and recognizable DirectCu II cover. As an additional treatment, a backplate is also equipped giving it even more style.
Going back on the PCB, we can see that it uses a 10+1+1 ASUS Digi+ VRM drawing power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Staying true to its branding, it supports heavy overclocking and provides several voltage tuning features.
Specification wise, this HD 7970 features a nice little factory overclock with 1000 MHz clock speed and 1400 MHz memory speed (5.60 GHz effective) right out of the box against the reference 925 MHz and 1375 MHz (5.50 GHz effective).
This new product is also equipped with the “VGA Hotwire” feature, allowing advanced users to eliminate the need for variable resistors and use the motherboard’s voltage controller to tune come key voltage domains of the graphics card as if it were the motherboard’s. This connection is made between the card and a special header on the ROG Rampage IV series motherboards, with one side being soldered onto the graphics card while the 2-pin cable connects to the board.
Display outputs are populated by two dual-link DVI and four full size DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. The card is 27.94 cm long, and is about as big as the previous generation of DirectCu II cards.
Although no price and release date have been given, it goes without saying that you’ll pay for the features, and even though Asus proved itself countless times, it won’t stop us from reviewing it and having a look of our own.
Source: TPU
