 Now this is something I've been wanting to unbox for a little while. This is the GTX 560 Ti DirectCU2. So basically this is an aftermarket cooled GTX 560, and once we open this up, I'm actually going to find out if it is also a non-reference PCB GTX 560. So the only way to find that out is to open the box, which I'm a big fan of doing. So the dual fan design is evidently up to 20 degrees cooler. It uses direct GPU contact in order to ensure that it gets, well, direct contact with the GPU for the heat pipes for better cooling performance. It also has super alloy power, which blends select elements under ASUS exclusive formula, resulting in a 15% performance increase, 2.5 times longer product lifespan, and 35 degree cooler operation. That's quite a bold claim. Voltage tweak technology allows you to boost the GPU voltages via ASUS Smart Doctor to achieve up to 50% faster clock speed. Overclocking capability may be varied by different cards and platform. Extreme cooling is required to achieve 50% faster. Okay, something about the card. General technologies, yes, this is a GeForce card, so it does support CUDA, SLI, 3D vision. It supports even 3D vision surround when you are in SLI mode. It is a 1GB card, so it has a standard configuration as far as memory is concerned. And then we're going to go ahead and get this opened up. Ooh, nice box. Look at that. Matte black box with nice gold font on it. I like it. I've come to appreciate fine boxes. Ooh, it gets even nicer when we get inside. Look at that. You know how expensive it is to have to make a box that's black on both sides? You guys have no idea. Compared to just like a white box or just a plain cardboard box, it's much more expensive. So yeah, ASUS really put everything into the packaging of this product. It's nice to see them care, you know. You can see the card itself is well protected by nice closed cell foam here. Okay, what do we got here? We got video drivers, okay, gamer OSD, smart doctor. Okay, so some ASUS software. Download the latest from the ASUS website instead. Okay, here we've also got a quick setup guide. Ooh, look at that in color. I'm impressed again. Very impressed. Color setup guide. Here we've got our accessories compartment. So that's its own little box. These guys are going after Razer at this point. Well, not quite Razer. Razer's pretty good packaging. So here's kind of a neat thing. This is a mini HDMI to HDMI adapter. And you can see it's actually twisted at a right angle so that plugging an HDMI cable in won't interfere with plugging something into the next-over DVI port. Here we've got a DVI to VGA adapter and two dual Molex to single PCIe 6-pin power adapters. Finally, we have the card itself, which does not come in an anti-static bag. So I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is anti-static foam. This is a very nice looking card. I'll tell you guys that right off the bat here. Because it has my favorite thing in the world. Well, not my favorite thing in the world, but I really like it. Matte black PCB. Bravo, Asus. Matte black PCB. Love it. Especially with some of the new motherboards out there on the P67 platform featuring matte black PCBs. This would go with it just nicely. You can also see they've got tastefully accented colors to go with their matte black. So there's a little bit of... Oh, okay. Please don't do that. Cat's trying to steal the foam. He loves foam. He's such a brat. No. No. There. Okay. So they've got tastefully accented colors to go along with the matte black. So you can see the aluminum heatsink here that is part of the direct CU cooler. Right there you can see where the heat pipe goes. And if I can get exactly the right angle here, you might be able to see where the GPU is down there. There. That's the GPU that you can see through the crack there. Okay, and then they've got a couple Asus logos which are also nice, like silver. One of them's a little bit askew, but we can fix that quite easily. There we go. We've got dual six-pin PCIe power connectors required to run this board. And we've also got a single SLI connector up here at the top of the PCB. So what that means is that you have support for two-way SLI, but not three-way and not four-way. Okay? Dual fans. These both look like 80-millimeter fans. And this is kind of a unique layout. Okay? So you can see this is kind of neat. It's kind of a hybrid design. So this is a heatsink. Okay? This is a heatsink with a fan. And then what Asus has also done, so that directly cools the GPU. There's actually slots in the heatsink, here, here, and here, where it looks like... I'm just going to look for them. Yeah, it looks like that's to give direct ventilation. Here, I'm going to try and get a little bit more light for you guys here to the memory chip. See the memory chips in there? So that gives you direct airflow over the memory chips, instead of relying on heatsinks to cool them, which can often just insulate them more than anything else. See more memory chips here, which also have direct exposure to airflow. Very clever little design choice to make. And then what you can see they've done is they've actually put those direct touch heat pipes down there, right over the GPU, and then made a little fin arrangement. So this is... it's a heatsink, but it's also a heat pipe cooler. So that means that both of these fans are able to be effective at cooling that GPU over there, without Asus actually having to use so many heat pipes to spread out the heat lug, because they're using a direct heatsink and a heat pipe cooler. So that's pretty neat. So this is the direct CU2 cooler. We've got some little red accents that look quite nice. We've got a PCI Express 16x interface down here at the bottom with a standard lock. So I did answer my own question when I saw that it was a matte black PCB, because Nvidia reference cards do not use a matte black PCB. Now let's see what else we got here. There's a little dedicated heatsink here. You can see it right there for the MOSFETs. That is for the voltage delivery, so that's on that side. And you can kind of see it from the top there as well. It's that one right there. And let's see what else we got. It's a nice metal shroud too. They're using a metal shroud for the cooler. So what that means is that it's not cheap. It's not plastic. Very, very nice. And what's this? This seems to be just a plate for making the card more rigid, which is smart. So you can see that this plate is bolted into the PCB here and here, and it's also bolted into the I.O. shield here. So that's going to give your card, instead of just being held in by the PCI Express slot and the two screws here, it's going to give it a little bit more rigidity so it'll actually sit flat. Many a card installed in my system that kind of looks like this when it's installed because of the weight of the cooler. Okay, let's have a look at the back of the card. You can see that the DirectCU2, even though it has a slot here, is not going to be doing...hold on, focus, focus, focus, you stupid thing... is not going to be doing a whole lot of exhaust out of this vent, because the fan is actually way over here, and there's no direct airflow path from the fan to the vent. So this is mostly going to exhaust the air inside your case, so you do have to make a trade-off. You've got to decide what's more important to me. Do I want lower GPU temps overall, so more overclocking on my GPU, or do I want lower case temps? Now remember, you can combat the internal exhaust just by having a well-ventilated case versus having an external exhaust designed for your card, like, say for example, the GTX 580 reference card that's over there, where it exhausts all of the air outside of the case. And I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about the GTX 560 DirectCU2. There's our DVI ports, there's our mini HDMI port. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of this card, and I will do a follow-up comparing it in terms of temperatures against the reference-designed GTX 560 Ti that I also have. Oh, I didn't even mention! Yes, this is a factory overclocked card, so it comes clocked at 830 MHz on the core. Don't forget to subscribe, guys!