14 DAY TRIAL // With the Radeon HD 7950 now out, Asus made official a trio of graphics cards based on this design, including a pair of DirectCU II models featuring the company’s trademark design specially tuned for overclockers and enthusiasts.
Just like their predecessors, the DirectCU II graphics cards use a massive cooler that occupies no less than three PCI slots inside the system, as well as a highly customized PCB and special overclocking options.
These include a series of voltage measurement points, a 12-phase VRM circuitry with supper alloy caps and chocks, as well as a special SAP capacitor added to maximize overclocking headroom according to Asus.
As far as cooling is concerned, Asus says that its design keeps the core 20% cooler than AMD’s reference design.
This allowed the company to push the Top version of the Radeon HD 7950 Direct CU II over its reference frequencies, so the GPU is clocked at 900MHz, while the memory works at 1250MHz (5GHz data rate).
The non-Top version of Asus’ DirectCU II card works at AMD’s reference clocks of 800MHz for the GPU and 1250MHz (5GHz data rate) for the memory.
The video connector configuration of the HD 7950 DirectCU II cards was also modified by Asus. They come with two DVI outputs (one DVI-I and one DVI-D), as well as with four DisplayPort connectors.
This design change allows for up to six displays to be connected in Eyefinity mode, Asus also providing its users with a DVI to HDMI adapter.
Besides these two DirectCU II graphics cards, Asus Radeon HD 7950 lineup also includes the HD7950-3GD5, which uses AMD’s reference design and comes clocked at the stock 800MHz/1250MHz frequencies.
Asus hasn’t made public the price of its three Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards, but Newegg has the HD7950-3GD5 listed at $464.99 (352.6 EUR), while the DirectCU II Top model is priced at $499.99 (379 EUR).
