The Asus GTX580 Direct CU II is supplied in a J.R. Tolkien style box with a fantasy style knight riding a battlehorse. Sure, it's corny, but we doubt anyone cares. The main focus on the box is centered around the cooling performance, which we will look at later in great detail.
The bundle is essentials only, with a power converter cable, SLI (extra long) connector, VGA adapter, and literature on the product with a software disc.
Asus have taken the GTX580 back to the drawing board and have totally redesigned the cooling system with a dual fan configuration. The cooler is a metal design, easily noticeable the first time you lift the card, as it is really heavy. The 80mm fans rest over heatpipes and a parallel aluminum fin array, directly cooling the hardware below. Five copper heatpipes transfer heat to either side of the cooler design ensuring a wide cooling coverage.
As can be seen from the images above, there is also a backplate system in place which totally covers the PCB area. Asus are also using a ‘Super Alloy Power' system which is a total overhaul and upgrade of all system components on the PCB. Asus claim a 15% performance increase over the reference board with a 2.5 x life span improvement with 35c cooler operation. We will test some of these claims later.
The card supports SLI modes, in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. It requires two 8 pin PCI power connectors to operate, the reference cards we have looked at before have required a 6 pin and an 8 pin connector.
ASUS have changed the display output configuration against the reference design. They are offering 2 DVI, a full sized HDMI port (very useful) and a Displayport connector. This card however won't support 3 screens unless you move to an SLI configuration, which is expensive. AMD are still leading the way in this regard.
The card design really is stellar and this particular card is a fantastic highlight of the ASUS engineering quality.
ASUS have enhanced the clock speeds of the card, delivering the solution with a 782mhz core clock. The 1.5GB of GDDR5 is running at 1002mhz via the 384 memory interface. Direct X 11, PCIe 2.0, DirectCompute 5.0, CUDA, OpenCL and PhysX are all supported, as is acceleration of high definition media content. The onboard processor can output 7.1 audio over the HDMI connector.