Asus GTX580 Direct CU II Review – the ultimate 580?

Asus are certainly capable of creating some of the finest video cards on the market – the ARES and MARS are prime examples of how far they can push the envelope. Without question this GTX580 Direct CU II would be our first choice of recommendation to an enthusiast user wanting the highest performance nVidia card. The Asus technicans have completely turned the reference design on its head, and have released a card capable of class leading performance while generating minimal levels of noise.

The Direct CU II cooler in particular really deserves a high level of critical acclaim because the bios profile has both fans spinning at a maximum of 1,600 rpm, even under sustained, heavy load – the fine act of balancing heat against noise is maintained perfectly throughout the thermal curve. The coolers heatpipe design leading out to two seperate racks of aluminum fins certainly helps the heat to spread evenly, while both fans help eradicate any hot spots across the full diameter of the PCB.

Even though the card demands two 8 pin power connectors, the consumption has been fine tuned by ASUS engineers and considering the power at hand, the efficiency is actually pretty good.

We weren't expecting such good results when overclocking, but our final core clock of 973mhz certainly shows the potential headroom with this specific design – a 25 percent core overclock is no mean feat on such a high end GPU. Obviously, not all cards will reach this level, but we would assume that 930-950mhz will be easily achieved with some voltage increases via the SmartDoctor software.

Game performance is staggering, leaving both GTX570 and HD6970 trembling in the wake of frame rate insanity. Tessellation performance is also off the charts, as we have seen with the raw Tessmark test. Now all we need are games which actually use the horsepower, rather than just pretty synthetic benchmarks.

There are a few negatives, we have no idea why Asus have opted for such a feeble ‘out of the box' overclock. The core is easily pushed to 900mhz without voltage adjustments, so even factoring in some variances between individual cards, 850mhz or even 875mhz would have been a more eye catching sales pitch.

The second negative point is the nVidia hardware limitation of supporting only two screens. While you can SLI the cards and then game across three monitors, the additional cost in this instance would be out of reach of most people. In reality not many people could afford one of these cards, never mind two.

In closing, this ASUS GTX580 Direct CU II is an engineering showcase, highlighting ASUS strengths as a top grade supplier of enthusiast level components. Not many people will be able to afford this card, but if you are in the market for a GTX580, then we suggest you save a few pennies more and opt for this particular model.

KitGuru says: If you have £500 to spare and you want the highest frame rates possible across a single high resolution display, then this is the card to get.

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