Technical data / specifications

With the DirectCUII ASUS has the first high-end NVIDIA 500-series graphics card in its portfolio that features an improved power design as well as a new cooler. This card can rely on eight phases and to furhter improve reliability ASUS provided the different components like coils, capacitors, POSCAPS and MOSFETs with an alloy which should keep them cooler and therefore improve the components lifespan. One can also find two 8-pin power connectors. The message ASUS sends out, especially with the two 8-pin connectors, is quite clear and aims at extreme overclocking.
Another key component with this card is the DirectCUII cooler which also is a design by ASUS and has been equipped with two 100 millimeter fans. You also find five heatpipes with a diameter of eight millimeter. According to ASUS this cooler should work much more efficient than the reference model. In reality we see that when the card is in idle mode it is just a little bit noisier then the reference but under heavy load conditions it's not only working more efficient it is also way more silent.
Looking at the clock speed we can see that the GTX580 DirectCUII comes with a 10 MHz overclocking on the GPU which is almost standard with ASUS graphics cards these days.

	ASUS GTX 580 DirectCU II	GTX 480	ASUS HD 6970 DirectCU II	ASUS EAH6950
Chip	GF110	GF100	Cayman	Cayman
Process	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	3.0billion	3.2 billion	2.64 billion	2.64 billion
GPU clock	782 MHz	700 MHz	890 MHz	820 MHz
Shader clock	1'544 MHz	1'401 MHz	890 MHz	820 MHz
Memory	1'536 MB GDDR5	1'536 MB GDDR5	2'048 MB GDDR5	2'048 MB GDDR5
Memory clock	1'002 MHz	924 MHz	2'750 MHz	2'500 MHz
Memory interface	384 Bit	384 Bit	256 Bit	256 Bit
Memory bandwidth	192'400 MB/s	177'408 MB/s	176'000 MB/s	160'000 MB/s
TMUs	64	60	96	88
TAUs	64	60	96	88
Shader Cores	512 (1D)	480 (1D)	384 (4D)	352 (4D)
ROPs	48 ROP	48 ROP	32 ROP	32 ROP
Shader model	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5
Maximum board power	244 Watt	250 Watt	250 Watt	200 Watt

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 6 - Futuremark
Page 2 - Specifications	Page 7 - Unigine Heaven / Stone Giant
Page 3 - Preview	Page 8 - World in Conflict / Resident Evil 5
Page 4 - Overclocking	Page 9 - Call of Juarez / Far Cry 2
Page 5 - Testing conditions	Page 10 - Conclusion

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