ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini review - Article

The mini-me amongst GeForce GTX 670 cards

Hey ya'll and welcome to another GeForce GTX 670 review. In this article we'll look at a really nice offering from ASUS as we review the ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini edition. It is a compact performance graphics card designed primarily for small form factor PCs with mini ITX motherboards. This tiny dual-slot card measures just 17cm and features the NVIDIA GTX 670 GPU. The GeForce GTX 670 is the little brother of the GTX 680 and comes, well how to put it, slightly castrated. NVIDIA disabled a couple of shader processors and designed a more cost effective and smaller PCB.

The card itself remains very beefy in terms of performance though, which you'll understand once we sift through the specifications. The GK104 GPU based graphics card has one SM/SMX cluster disabled. This gives the GK104 GPU 1344 CUDA cores to work with, with in total, 112 texture and 32 raster operating units. The graphics card also has slightly slower clock frequencies than big daddy GTX 680, with a reference baseclock speed of 915 MHz (928 MHz for this ASUS model). However the GTX 670 as well comes with a Boost clock which is set at 980 MHz -- not far off from the GTX 680 at all (I'm talking about the reference clocks here).  The DirectCU Mini edition has a factory memory clock remains standard at 6008 MHz.

With a TDP at roughly 160 Watts the card won't draw too much power either. It might be tiny in size, but it packs power, it is silent and the GPU core temperatures remain completely under control. With all that said and done you have the more important variables in your mindset, have a peek at the product after we dive right into the review. Next page please.