ASUS ENGTX570 DirectCU II Video Card Review

We loved the feel of this card both in the mass and the solid aluminum fan shroud, no plastic here. We also liked that they included a display port in addition to the standard GTX 570 ports to increase your display options. Little things like the back plate with sleek graphics are great visual touches that have a functional purpose as well are great additions to this very reasonably price package at $319.99 shipped from Newegg after a mail-in-rebate.

While it is hard to not like a current generation GPU that overclocks to over 1GHz on air, we are surprised that they only factory overclocked this card by 10MHz on the core. We proved it has a ton of extra power just waiting to be tapped so why not dial it up considering they do not have a GTX 570 offering above this one. Our only guess is to prevent it from competing too much with the GTX 580 offerings from ASUS. The totally custom black PCB is sweet looking but it does mean you are locking into their cooling solution and forget water cooling this bad boy.

We are somewhat conflicted about the triple slot cooling solution. On one hand it is the reason we were able to break the 1GHz barrier with overclocking because it performs so unbelievably well and runs dead silent as a bonus. On the other hand you lose three slots and good luck finding a motherboard that can handled two of these monsters in SLI. But most people only run one card in there systems at all and it would be the dedicated GPU so is it really that much of an issue? Probably not!

This ASUS card is a monster in sheep’s clothing and we are happy to give it a recommended award. It probably would have made an editor’s choice award if the factory overclock had been more substantial and covered under the 3 year limited warranty.