Asus GTX 660 DirectCU II Graphics Card Review

Recently we have looked at a number of tweaked and tuned cards from a number of manufacturers that offer up more performance out the box, which for a large number of users is a great thing. There is a downside to this however and that lies with the cost – an overclocked card comes with a slightly higher price tag to its stock counterpart and for some people, this little increase in price is not always worth the bother. Why not just get a reference specified card with a performance cooler and give it the overclock treatment yourself – after all it’s easy enough to do that these days and a number of vendors – including Asus, even include the software to do so in the box.

So if each manufacturer is offering up cards that on paper have the same level of performance, what sets each apart? Well whilst this is obvious for some, others may not realise that this is where it all comes down to one vital component of any card; the cooler. Very few manufacturers these days simply ship out cards that are purely reference designs with their own branding on as they don’t stand out for the crowd. Consequently we see the big names battling it out on the cooler ground in a heated battle of which the heatsink and fan combo is vital. Gigabyte hold their patch with Windforce, MSI have Twin Frozr, Sapphire have their vapour chamber design and Asus have the popular DirectCU II to put forward.

The box that Asus uses, follows a similar design path to other boxes that we have seen recently, including that of the 660Ti DirectCU II TOP that we looked at not too long ago.

Alongside the card we find a ‘Speed Setup’ manual, driver CD with GPU Tweak and a DVI-VGA adaptor.