now this is something I've been wanting to unbox for a little while this is the
GTX 560 TI direct cu2 so basically this
is an aftermarket cooled GTX 560 and
once we open this up I'm actually going to find out if it is also a
non-reference PCB GTX 560 so the only
way to find that out is to open the box which I'm a big fan of doing so the dual
fan design is evidently up to 20° cooler
it uses direct GPU contact in order to ensure that it gets get well direct
contact with the GPU for the heat pipes for better cooling performance it also
has super alloy power which blends select elements under a Seuss exclusive
formula resulting in a 15% performance increase 2.5 times longer product
lifespan and 35° 35° cooler operation
that's quite a bold claim voltage tweak technology allows you to boost the GPU
voltages via ASUS smart doctor to achieve up to 50% faster clock speed
over clocking capability may be varied by different cards and platforms extreme cooling is required to achieve 50%
faster okay uh something about the card
General Technologies yes this is a GeForce card so it does support Cuda SLI
3D Vision it supports even 3D Vision
surround when you are in SLI mode it is a 1 gig card so it has a standard
configuration as far as memory is concerned and we're going to go ahead
and get this opened up o nice box look at that matte black box with nice gold
font on on it I like it I've come to
appreciate fine boxes ooh it gets even nicer when we get
inside look at that you know how expensive it is to have to make a box
that's black on both sides you guys have no idea compared to just like a white
box or just a plain cardboard box it's much more expensive so uh yeah ASUS
really put everything into the packaging of this product just nice to see them
care you know you can see the card self is well protected by nice closed cell
foam here okay what do we got here we
got uh video drivers okay gamer OSD smart doctor okay so some ASUS software
download the latest from the ASUS website instead okay here we've also got
a quick setup guide o look at that in color I'm
impressed again very impressed color setup guide here we've got our
accessories compartment So that's its own little box
these guys are going after razor at this point well not quite Razer razer's
pretty got pretty good packaging so here's kind of a neat thing this is a
mini HDMI to HDMI adapter and you can see it's actually Twisted at a right
angle so that plugging an HDMI cable in won't interfere with plugging something
into the next over DVI port here we've
got a DVI to VGA adapter and two dual
dual MOX to single PCI E6 pin power
adapters finally we have the card itself which does not come in an anti-static
bag so I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is anti-static foam this is a
very nice looking card I'll tell you guys that right off the bat here cuz it
has my favorite thing in the world well not my favorite thing in the
world but I really like it matte black PCB Bravo ASUS matte black PCB love it
especially with some of the new motherboards out there on the p67
platform featuring matte black pcbs this
would go with with it just nicely you can also see they've got Tastefully
accented colors to go with their matte black so there's a little bit of oh okay
please don't do that cat's trying to steal the foam he loves foam he's such a
brat no no there okay so they've got
Tastefully accented colors to go along with the matte black so you can see the
aluminum heat sink here that is part of the direct CU cooler right there you can
see where the heat pipe goes and uh if I can get exactly the right angle here you
might be able to see where the GPU is
down there there that's the GPU that you can see through the crack there okay and
then they've got a couple of Seuss logos which are also nice like silver one of
them is a little bit a skew but we can fix that quite easily there we go we've
got dual six pin PCIe power connectors required to run this board and we've
also got a single SLI connector up here at the top of the PCB so what that means
is that you have support for two-way SLI but not three-way and not four-way okay
dual fans these both look like 80 mm fans and this is kind of a unique layout
okay so you can see this is this is kind of neat it's like kind of a hybrid
design so this is a heat sink okay this is a heat sink with a fan and then what
ASUS has also done so that directly cools the GPU there's actually slots in
the heat sink here here and here where it looks like I'm just going to look for
them yeah it looks like that's to give direct ventilation here I'm going to try
and get a little bit more light for you guys here to the memory chip see the
memory chips in there so that gives you direct air flow over the memory chips
instead of relying on heat sinks to cool them which can often just insulate them
more than anything else see more memory chips here which are also have direct
exposure to air flow very clever little
design choice to make and then what you can see they've done is they've actually
put those direct touch heat pipes down there right over the GPU and then made
little fin Arrangement so this is It's a
heat sink but it's also a heat pipe cooler so that means that both of these
fans are able to be effective at cooling that GPU over there without isus
actually having to use so many heat pipes to spread out the heat load
because they're using a direct heat sink and a heat pipe cooler so that's pretty
neat so this is the direct cu2 cooler we've got some little red accents to
look quite nice we've got a PCI Express
16x interface down here at the bottom with a standard lock so I did answer my
own question when I saw that it was a matte black PCB because NVIDIA reference
cards do not use a matte black PCB uh let's see what else we got here
there's a little dedicated heat sink here you can see it right there for the
mosfets that is for the voltage delivery so that's on that side and you can kind
of see it from the top there as well it's that one right there and let's see
what else we got this is a nice metal shroud too they're using a metal shroud
for the cooler so what that means is that it's not cheap it's not plastic
very very nice and uh what's this this
seems to be just a plate for making the card more rigid which is smart so you
can see that this plate is bolted into the PCB here and here and it's also
bolted into the io Shield here so that's going to give your card instead of just
being held in by the PCI Express lot and
the two screws here it's going to give it a little bit more rigidity so it'll
actually sit flat I've had many a card installed in my system that kind of
looks like this when it's installed because of the weight of the
cooler okay let's have a look at the back of the card you can see that the
direct cu2 even though it has a slot here is not going to be doing hold on
focus focus focus you stupid thing is not going to be doing a whole lot of
exhaust out of this vent cuz the fan is actually like way over here and there's
no direct airflow path from the fan to the vent so this is mostly going to
exhaust the air inside your case so you do have to make a trade-off you got to
decide what's more important to me do I want lower GPU temps overall so more
overclocking on my GPU or do I want lower case temps now remember you can
combat the internal exhaust just by having a well ventilated case versus
having an external exhaust designed for your card like say for example the GTX
580 reference card that's over there where it exhausts all of the air outside
of the case and I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about
the GTX 560 direct cu too there's our
DVI ports there's our mini HDMI port
thank you for checking out my unboxing of this card and I will do a follow-up
comparing it in terms of temperatures
against the reference design GTX 560ti
that I also have oh I didn't even mention yes this is a factory
overclocked card so it comes clocked at 830 MHz on the core don't forget to
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