14 DAY TRIAL // Asus is no stranger when it comes to building their own custom graphics card designs and the company really outdone itself when it built the GeForce GTX 580 DirectCu II, and now everyone can witness for him/herself the awesomeness that Asus introduced with this card as it has just been pulled apart and thoroughly inspected.
The first thing that anyone will notice when picking up Asus' latest GTX 580 is just how massive this card is as the Taiwanese company decided to pair it with an impressive cooling solution.
[admark=1]This is made out to use five direct contact 6mm thick heatpipes as well as dual 100x20mm fans, the whole setup occupying no less than three motherboard slots.
In exchange for the extra space used, Asus promises to deliver both quieter operation and cooler temperatures.
If this is indeed true, it remains to be seen, but the cooling system sure looks the part.
Moving to the PCB, Asus decided to go its custom design, and packed a 10-phase power delivery circuit, eight of the phases being used for the GPU while the remaining two provide juice to the 12 memory chips that are placed asymmetrically around the graphics core.
The board is powered via two PCIe 8-Pin connectors, enabling the GeForce GTX 580 DirectCu II to draw as much as 375W.
This will allow the board to get the power required in order to be run at higher than average frequencies, improving its overclocking performance.
However, in spite of the redesigned PCB, Asus decided not to raise the GPU clocks too high as the core is run at just 782 MHz, only 10MHz more than the reference design, while the memory follows Nvidia's standard 4008MHz clock.
According to Sweclocker, the website that provided us with these pictures, the Asus GeForce GTX 580 DirectCU II will be officially launched on January 25 (the same day as the GTX 560 Ti), for a yet undisclosed price.
