While the HD 6870 has been around for a while, we've actually seen a few companies release new versions of the card. While the DirectCU II version from ASUS has been out for a little while now; after using it in our $599 AMD Gaming PC Built and Tested and it doing a good job of impressing us, we had to make some time to look at it in all its glory.

When we did our $599 AMD Gaming PC article we didn't have an in depth look at the card itself, so we'll be taking our normal approach to the ASUS HD 6870 DirectCU II 1GB today. We'll start by looking at the package and then we'll take a closer look at the card itself before having a look at the specifications. Once we've done that, we'll get into the fun stuff and see how the card goes in our testbed. Because we've had a look at a few HD 6870s already and this one isn't part of the TOP series, we thought we'd take the time to do some overclocking ourselves and see how the DirectCU II cooler goes.