ASUS Radeon HD 6970 DirectCU II Graphics Card Review

Last week we covered two quite interesting products here at Hardware Heaven. The first was one of the initial factory overclocked a Radeon 6970s and the second, the ASUS GTX 580 DirectCU 2. In the case of the Radeon the performance was good but the card design was still reference. For the GTX 580, ASUS had completely reworked the product, enhanced the build quality and applied a huge (impressive) cooler to the front which made it the best card of its type we have tested.

So what if ASUS took the factory overclock idea from the 6970 Turbo then applied the same design ethic we saw on the GTX 580? They would end up with the Radeon 6970 DirectCU 2 and that is exactly what we have on our test bench today. We will be running this enhanced version of the 6970 through a selection of real world tests to find out how it compares to the GTX 570 and will include maximum overclock results in each case... all on an i7 CPU running at 4.4GHz.