AMD’s 68xx series GPUs have been out for a little while now. This means that the boring time of stock and reference designs is well past and now we get to see what happens when a manufacturer puts their best effort into designing a graphics card. In the past we have seen Asus stand out with some impressive designs. Their DirectCU and Voltage Tweak offerings have been excellent. Today we have one of these on the test bench in the form of the Asus EAH6870 DC/2DI2S/1GD5. This factory overclocked card features their DirectCU (hence the name) cooling which has the heat pipes sitting right on top of the GPU for better thermal performance. This new card also features Asus’ Voltage Tweak to help you get even more performance out of it. So let’s take a look and see if this $200.00 card is worth your time and money.
The EAH6870 DC/2DI2S/1GD5 -On the surface the EAH6870 looks like all of the other cards in the DirectCU line up. As you can see in the shots below it has the same distinctive cooling we have seen on other cards as well as the familiar “open” look.
Oddly enough while the GPU gets extra cooling from the direct contact cooler, the memory is left exposed. Fortunately, you can always buy some small heat sinks to deal with that issue. On the other hand the voltage regulators do get a decent sized heatsink.
Despite having the Voltage Tweak option you are also only getting two 6-pin PCIe power ports. So, either the 68xx series is very power friendly or it does not have the same voltage head room the 58xx did. My vote is on the second one, after all the 6xxx series is not really a new GPU (per say). It is more of a refresh when it comes to this particular GPU (it is the Barts core). You are still using VEC5 although tweaked for better DX11 performance. It also has a fairly high TDP even with a lower shader count; 1440 on an average 5850 and 1120 on the 6870 with TDPs of 151 and >150 respectively.
Of course after we were done with our testing we pulled the cooling off to see what we had underneath. As we mentioned before the cooling on top is almost identical to the direct contact cooling on the 5850s we have tested before.
The voltage regulation is towards the front the card which does give it better cooling on that section than what we saw on the EAH5850 DirectCU. Asus has also thrown in a cooling plate on the back to help reduce heat buildup on that side of the card.
