We’ve reviewed quite a few graphics cards from ASUS which use the DirectCU and this third iteration of the well-known cooler doesn’t fail to impress.

The foundation for DirectCU III is a large heatsink comprising of aluminium fins and five copper heatpipes which make direct contact with the GPU. The heat is transferred away from the GPU, through the fins and the cooling fans help to dispel the remaining warmth.


With this cooler now detached from the graphics card we can see take a look at the inner-workings and what ASUS has designed.

All of the components across our board are employed using Auto Extreme – the process which sees the construction take on a fully automated process.


The driving force behind our GTX 1070 is the new GP104 which uses NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture. This GPU comprises of 7.2 million transistors created by the 16nm TSMIC process. ASUS has applied a factory overclock to this card which translates to a healthy 10% increase.


Our graphics card employs an 8+2 power design and there are Super Alloy Power II components used throughout the PCB.

Super Alloy Power II includes: SAP II CAPs, SAP II Chokes, SAP II DrMOS and SAP II POSCAPs. In return, by using these components we can expect longer lifespan, better efficiency and more headroom for overclocking.

So bearing all this in mind, we’re left in no doubt of this graphics card’s capabilities. Over the next series of pages we’ll be running this graphics card through our benchmarking suite.