Asus Points Shrink Ray at GeForce GTX 970, Now Comes in Mini ITX Form

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Maxwell gets the mini ITX treatment

The mini ITX form factor has been gaining some serious street cred as of late. Of course, it was only a matter of time, with advances in technology leading to increasingly smaller parts that are much more powerful than their sizes suggest. The newest tiny treat for mini ITX builders is the Asus GeForce GTX 970 CD Mini, a small form factor graphics card that willl be right at home in your mini ITX motherboard.
It measures just 17cm in length, making for an easy fit inside a compact gaming PC. And not only is the card rocking Nvidia's Maxwell architecture underneath the hood, it also received Asus' DirectCU custom cooling treatment. According to Asus, the DirectCU cooler with vapor chamber offers 20 percent cooler temps and a "vastly quieter" experience compared to reference.
Asus didn't gimp the card, either. The GPU is actually overclocked to 1,088MHz base and 1,228MHz boost, up from Nvidia's reference blueprint that calls for 1,050MHz base and 1,178MHz boost clockspeeds. It's also paired with 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 7,010MHz (effective) on a 256-bit bus for 224GB/s of memory bandwidth (same as reference).
Connectivity options consist of DVI-I and DVI-D ports (one each), HDMI, and DisplayPort.
No word yet on the card's price or availability. As points of reference, the Asus Strix GeForce GTX 970 (full size) commands about $350 street. Gigabyte also makes a mini ITX variant of the GTX 970 (GIGABYTE GV-N970IXOC-4GD), and that one streets for around $340.
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