14 DAY TRIAL // There are many iterations of the same graphics card on today's market, but only some of them can truly claim to excel in a certain area or more, and ASUS seems to be gearing up to deliver such a device, the Radeon HD 6870 DirectCU.
As end-users know, the AMD Radeon HD 6870 is still the strongest available HD 6000 card, since the HD 6900 boards will only come out on December 15.
The HD 6870 is aimed at the higher level of the mainstream market, much like its more affordable and less mighty sibling, the HD 6850.
ASUS figured it was time to turn the HD 6870 into a true powerhouse especially suited for enthusiasts that like to mess with their hardware settings, so it gathered all of its Super Alloy components and got to work.
The result was a video controller with significant improvements to stability, product life and operating temperature, in other words one that can cope with quite a bit of tweaking on the user's part.
What this means is that ASUS implemented Super Alloy Capacitors, Super Alloy Chokes and Super Alloy MOS.
With those high-grade parts on the PCB, not only was the operational temperature lowered by up to 35 degrees Celsius, but the performance was boosted as well.
The GPU now has a frequency of 915 MHz instead of 900 MHz, while the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM operate at 4,200 MHz.
ASUS Radeon HD 6870 DirectCU, as it is called, also features 1,120 Stream Processors, a memory interface of 256 bits and dual-DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs.
Other specifications include the name-giving dual-slot DirectCU cooler, the Voltage Tweak function for overclocking and the Super Hybrid Engine, for automatic clock and power consumption adjustment.
All in all, the product sounds like a far more long-lived, stable and cool version of AMD's original card. Unfortunately, no pricing details were provided.