Introduction

They say if you put beavers on top of the Empire State building, they’d start looking for wood to create a dam. Lesson being, you can’t easily shake habit out of creatures, especially if it is something they are good at. For enthusiast overclockers, there is an itch to push the performance of things beyond the stock level. Some manufacturers have limited ways to make overclocking possible over the years but it is no match to the ingenuity of the curious mind. Thankfully, today this habit is widely supported and even encouraged by the world’s top motherboard and video card manufacturers.

The tools used to overclock over the years have changed. There was a time when pencil modding was a common practice and software tweaking had to rely on 3rd party software. These days, manufacturers understand the value of providing safe and easy to use tools for enthusiasts. The new GPU Tweak utility from ASUS, for example, provides voltage and clock adjustments on the desktop, as well as a temperature and performance monitoring tool. This software was initially introduced when the ASUS Matrix GTX 580 Platinum video card was released but is also compatible for any video card on the market, including the ASUS GTX 560 Ti Direct CU II.

The ASUS GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II has been improved beyond the reference design but keeps the standard GTX 560 Ti price. The ASUS GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II has a direct heat-pipe, dual-fan cooling design and has a completely custom PCB. Similar to other DirectCU II equipped video cards from ASUS, the GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II has Super Alloy Power technology, which consists of high-quality, heat-resistant and energy efficient components, which allow for highly stable performance and overclockability.