The DirectCU II cooler is an oldie but a goodie and is renowned as being one of the best cooling solutions on the market with its twin fan, twin heatpipe design and black/red styling on the shroud.
The cooler incorporates two Asus branded fans with smoked blades. The DirectCU II cooler is known for being one of the most competitive in the market and remains silent, even when under extreme performance loads and is able to push sufficient airflow to keep the core cool.
Obviously Nvidia have a proven track record when it comes to power deliverance and we find that this card has a TDP of 140 watts which is more than we expected, but for a card that has a fairly high clock speed and the ability to boost progressively, we have high hopes that the card can push forward. This is all down to a single 6-pin power connector located on the top of the card.
The card comes equipped with a single SLI connector allowing 2-way SLI for those wanting to experience multi-GPU technology.
The rear I/O of the card features a few ventilation holes to help with heat dissipation as well as a variety of display output connectors including a single and dual link DVI, a single HDMI and a single full sized DisplayPort.
As we can see, the GXT 650Ti with boost still revolves around the GK106 core. What the key difference is, is the addition of boost technology to the card, to dynamically add extra performance to the stock clock speeds. On top if this, Asus have given the new card an overclock as well to give it an extra bit of performance in the right direction over the reference core clock of 980MHz.
I’m especially impressed with the fact that it’s figures rival that of the old GTX 580.