Introduction
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570 is the latest high-end card for the budget-conscious gamer. Being built on the same foundation at GTX 580, it comes with reduced shader count, lower clock and also a lower price to fit a $350 price point.
ASUS has taken this successful base design and customized it on their GTX 570 Direct CU II using a brave approach: triple slot cooling design. The additional slot on the GTX 570 DCII allows a bigger cooling solution for improved cooling potential. ASUS has focused on reducing fan noise instead of delivering the lowest temperatures possible, which makes a lot of sense in my opinion. For you there is no difference whether the card is at 60° or 80° under load, but fan noise is something you will have to constantly live with.
The ASUS GTX 570 Direct CU II also comes with a small overclock to squeeze some extra performance out of the card. While other board vendors would charge a hefty price premium for such a design approach, ASUS only adds $10 to the cost of the GTX 570 DCII which is extremely reasonable and makes this card attractive for users who would only be looking at the reference design otherwise.
| Radeon HD 6850 | Radeon HD 5850 | GeForce GTX 470 | Radeon HD 6870 | Radeon HD 5870 | GeForce GTX 570 | ASUS GeForce GTX 570 DC II | GeForce GTX 480 | GeForce GTX 580 | Radeon HD 5970 |
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Shader units | 960 | 1440 | 448 | 1120 | 1600 | 480 | 480 | 480 | 512 | 2x 1600 |
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ROPs | 32 | 32 | 40 | 32 | 32 | 40 | 40 | 48 | 48 | 2x 32 |
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GPU | Barts | Cypress | GF100 | Barts | Cypress | GF110 | GF110 | GF100 | GF110 | 2x Cypress |
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Transistors | 1700M | 2154M | 3200M | 1700M | 2154M | 3000M | 3000M | 3200M | 3000M | 2x 2154M |
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Memory Size | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1280 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1280 MB | 1280 MB | 1536 MB | 1536 MB | 2x 1024 MB |
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Memory Bus Width | 256 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit | 320 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit | 2x 256 bit |
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Core Clock | 775 MHz | 725 MHz | 607 MHz | 900 MHz | 850 MHz | 732 MHz | 742 MHz | 700 MHz | 772 MHz | 725 MHz |
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Memory Clock | 1000 MHz | 1000 MHz | 837 MHz | 1050 MHz | 1200 MHz | 950 MHz | 950 MHz | 924 MHz | 1002 MHz | 1000 MHz |
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Price | $180 | $200 | $250 | $220 | $270 | $350 | $360 | $400 | $500 | $580 |
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Packaging
Contents
You will receive:
- Graphics card
- Driver CD + Documentation
- DVI Adapter
- Long SLI Bridge
- PCI-Express Power Cable
The Card
The cooler on the ASUS GTX 570 Direct CU II is huge and heavy, this gives the card a high-quality monster product feeling when you hold it in your hands.
ASUS GTX 570 Direct CU II is one of the few cards that requires three slots in your system. It promises to justify that with reduce noise and improved thermal performance.
The card has two DVI ports, one full-size HDMI port and one full-size DisplayPort. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.
NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output.
You may combine up to four GTX 570 cards of any model from any vendor in SLI.
Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (
front,
back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.