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.
Value -The EAH6870 DirectCU will set you back about $200 from your average E-tailer. This is about $20 more than the EAH5850 DirectCU and around $180 less than the EAH5870 V2 we use in our testing. With that said the 6870 Direct CU’s performance really does fall into line with its market position and pricing. After all if you are only paying $20-30 more to get this card and getting about 10-15% more performance then you are getting something of a deal really. I would expect the EAH6870 to drop in price sometime around summer anyway so the performance/cost figures will go up for the average consumer. Conclusion -The Asus EAH6870 DirectCU is something of a misleading product. This is not the fault of Asus, but more one from AMD. We would expect (as would most consumers) that something called the 6870 would be the direct replacement for the 5870, but it turns out that this is not the case at all. As such I feel that more than a few consumers will be unhappy with the performance of this card. That is not to say that the EAH6870 Direct CU does not perform well for where it is intended to be (by AMD). I am saying that AMD has caused consumer confusion with this new release. Still if we put all that aside and ask ourselves “does the EAH6870 DirectCU perform as it should for its market space?” the answer is a yes.
