Technical data / specifications

With the DirectCUII ASUS has the first high-end AMD graphics card in its portfolio that features an improved power design as well as a new cooler. This card now can rely on nine 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 their 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 realitiy we see that when the card is in idle mode it is a little bit noisier then the reference but under heavy load conditions it is more silent.
Looking at the clock speed we can see that the HD 6970 DirectCUII comes with a 10 MHz overclocking on the GPU which is almost standard with ASUS graphics cards these days.

	ASUS HD 6970 DirectCUII	ASUS EAH6950	ASUS EAH6850	ASUS EAH5870	GTX 580
Chip	Cayman	Cayman	RV940	RV870	GF110
Process	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	2.64 billion	2.64 billion	1.7 billion	2.15 billion	3.0billion
GPU clock	890 MHz	820 MHz	790 MHz	850 MHz	772 MHz
Shader clock	890 MHz	820 MHz	790 MHz	850 MHz	1'544 MHz
Memory	2'048 MB GDDR5	2'048 MB GDDR5	1'024 MB GDDR5	1'024 MB GDDR5	1'536 MB GDDR5
Memory clock	2'750 MHz	2'500 MHz	1'000 MHz	1'200 MHz	1'002 MHz
Memory interface	256 Bit	256 Bit	256 Bit	256 Bit	384 Bit
Memory bandwidth	176'000 MB/s	160'000 MB/s	128'000 MB/s	153'600 MB/s	192'400 MB/s
TMUs	96	88	48	80	64
TAUs	96	88	48	80	64
Shader Cores	384 (4D)	352 (4D)	192 (5D)	320 (5D)	512 (1D)
ROPs	32 ROP	32 ROP	32 ROP	32 ROP	48 ROP
Shader model	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5
Maximum board power	250 Watt	200 Watt	127 Watt	188 Watt	244 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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