Asus GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini Review

Performance Analysis

This is the fifth GTX 970 we've looked at, so the results should be fairly familiar by now. Of those that we've seen, this one has the lowest speeds out of the box, so it was never going to be the quickest. However, we're talking differences of a few frames per second at most between it and the quickest one, which is typically the Galax GTX 970 EXOC Black Edition.

In Battlefield 4, the GTX 970 DirectCU Mini is smooth at 1440p with a 38fps minimum, although cranking it up to 4K (without anti-aliasing) sees it drop to just 25fps. In both instances the AMD R9 290X has a slight lead. However, this isn't true in BioShock Infinite, where the Asus card does very well compared to AMD's best single GPU card. It manages a silky smooth minimum of 64fps at 1440p and even stays above 30fps at 4K.


In Crysis 3, our most demanding game, the Asus card manages to stay above 30 fps at 1440p. It has one of the worst results at 4K, but this is relatively meaningless since this is a task beyond the realm of any single GPU card – they're all totally unplayable, though the R9 290X is again slightly ahead here. Naturally, the card can handle Skyrim without issue, but the R9 290X again steps up its game, managing a 54fps minimum at 4K where this one only gets 47fps.

In Unigine Valley, the GTX 970 DirectCU Mini is again one of the slower GTX 970s we've tested – Galax's card has a lead of 6 percent at 1080p and 8 percent at 1440p thanks to its higher factory overclock and more aggressive boosting. Asus's card does trump the R9 290X by a fair margin here, but Nvidia's hardware is faster in this benchmark generally.

The power consumption test reveals that the GTX 970 DirectCU Mini is a very efficient graphics card, beating its own brethren, the Asus Strix GTX 970, to be the least power hungry GTX 970 we've seen. Using it, our total system power consumption was just 264W – the aforementioned Galax card may have a small lead in the benchmarks, but it consumes 62W more to get there.


On the flip side, the small cooler means the Asus card is also the hottest running GTX 970 we've seen, though its delta T of 51°C is still not exactly high, and is only 4°C warmer than that of the significantly larger, dual-fan EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX2. It is also, of course, much cooler than the R9 290X and far quieter too – it was actually very hard to hear above the rest of our system. Still, you'll want to ensure you have decent ventilation for your GPU to stop it having to spin up faster or reduce its boosting from getting too hot.

The overclocking results are fantastic, with the card improving its scores in our benchmarks by between 13 and 16 percent. Despite the limited cooler size, single power input and relatively low number of power phases, the GTX 970 DirectCU Mini almost keeps pace with the MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G and Galax GTX 970 EXOC Black Edition, only ever losing out by 1 or 2fps in Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3, probably due to the small cooler meaning it can't boost quite as aggressively as them. Not only that, but the overclock was super efficient too – our system power consumption only rose to 290W, which is still less than the results of the EVGA, MSI and Galax cards all at their factory speeds. Of course, we could just have a good sample, but the single 8-pin connector doesn't appear to limit the GPU. Better still, compared to stock testing, the fan speed only increased by 1 percent and the temperature by 3°C, so there's very little reason not to push this card further.

Conclusion

For us, this is what the GTX 970 is all about. The efficiency of the GPU is such that you don't need large coolers to keep it both cool and quiet, as the DirectCU Mini cooler illustrates very well. The dinky dimensions make this card the perfect companion for a gaming mini-ITX rig, and the size and cooler do not appear to limit your overclocking potential either, provided your case has decent enough airflow. If you're not space-limited, you could opt for a cheaper but larger alternative with semi-passive cooling instead, but for £280 we think this card is a fair deal given the quality of its build, components and performance. We should point out that Gigabyte's competing GTX 970 Mini-ITX card is around £10 less, but even so the only thing we can fault this card for is not having a metal fan shroud, and that's something we could easily live with.