ASUS GTX670-DCMOC-2GD5 Pro Reviews

The ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU Mini card is what I consider an awesome idea and executed beautifully. The reason I say this is that smaller systems are really becoming more popular and all you need to do is attend a LAN to see this, so it comes naturally to see chassis and motherboard manufacturers pumping out solutions to fill this need, but in reality we have not seen many manufacturers thinking outside the box in regards to GPU and providing a compact yet high performance solution for these mini rigs. This is where ASUS stepped in and created this card and it simply works. Knowing the market demands smaller systems and overall solutions that still can do some serious work ASUS took the ball and ran with it. I hope this spurs the market to create more compact solutions as that means more powerful systems taking up less and less space and that’s never a bad thing. For anybody looking to build their next small form factor rig I really think you would have a tough tiome finding a better fir for a mini system than the ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU Mini.

Most gamers and enthusiasts focus on getting the highest possible performance for their money and push secondary concerns like power consumption and card size aside. However, there’s a growing niche that understandably wants their PCs to be minimally intrusive in their environments. That means moving towards smaller, more compact form factors. At this point in time the SFF market is relatively well represented, with quite a few enclosures, motherboards and even CPU heatsinks catering to confined environments. Unfortunately, gamers who wanted a smaller system either had to sacrifice GPU performance or move their system into a slightly larger case since a high end graphics card typically led to a larger footprint. Not anymore.

As much as the GTX 670 Mini is an impressive feat of engineering, that doesn't mean it's worth your money. You can already pick up faster, cheaper cards such as the top-end Sapphire HD 7970 GHz, and drop them straight into a funky mini-ITX form factor - just like that. It's admirable but ultimately inessential.

ASUS pulled off the seemingly impossible with their GeForce GTX 670 DC Mini. They managed to release a high-end gaming-grade graphics card that fits inside a mini-ITX case. NVIDIA laid the foundation for this by engineering their GK104 graphics chip to use as little power as possible and designing their reference GTX 670 with a short PCB. ASUS only had to devise an equally compact cooling solution that could handle the card's heat generation. This seems to have taken some engineering skill to achieve since they are the first to release a GTX 670 with such a small form factor, and it has almost been a year since the GTX 670's initial release. When I first heard about the ASUS GTX 670 DC Mini, I expected a lot of compromises to have been made, but that is not the case. The card really feels like any other GTX 670 (and I've tested many of them). Gaming works really well. The card easily handles everything with all the eye-candy turned on at full HD. ASUS also includes a small factory-overclock out of the box; barely worth mentioning with just 13 MHz. Overall performance does end up 2% higher than the reference design, which seems to be due to an optimized boost clock algorithm. Even with the Mini-ITX focused design of the DC Mini, I would have liked a bit more overclock out of the box, and a memory overclock. The increased heat output should be negligible.