Card Pictures

The HD 6870 DirectCU II cooler isn't too crazy when compared to the HD 6900 series DirectCU II that is a triple slot one. The HD 6870 DirectCU II is a good looking card, though, with its all black PCB and across the top you can see a couple of heat pipes coming out the top.

Taking a quick look around the card, we've got two 6-Pin PCI-E power connectors towards the back of the card while closer to the front we see a single CrossFire connector in the normal position.

Connectivity on the ASUS HD 6870 DirectCU II is a little different to other cards we've seen. We've got two DisplayPort connectors and two DVI connectors; one's DVI-I while the other is DVI-D. While there's no HDMI present on the card, connecting via HDMI is possible thanks to the inclusion of a DVI to HDMI connector in the package.

Specifications

Out of the box ASUS have done a little bit of an overclock with the core being bumped to 915MHz from the standard 900MHz. ASUS have left he memory clock alone, though, with that coming in at 4200MHz QDR.

Since it's not the highest overclock we've seen, we thought we'd mix it up a bit by overclocking the card. What we chose to do, though, was overclock without increasing the voltage which is something a lot of people like to do. Adjusting voltages is something that does scare some people off a little, so we thought we'd look at overclocking and the performance of the DirectCU II cooler without the extra voltage.

You can see above in our GPU-Z screenshot we got the core running at a nice 950MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 comes in now at 4800MHz QDR. This is a really nice overclock considering we haven't bumped the core voltage. Let's check out performance.