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NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 580 is seemingly ripe for an extreme ASUS makeover, and the Taiwanese manufacturer is hoping to deliver the goods with this; the ASUS GTX 580 DirectCU II.

Notice anything particularly different? No? Take a look from the side:

The monster card occupies a full three expansion slots, enabling it to house a larger-than-usual pairing of two 100x20mm fans. The combination should provide a healthy amount of airflow across the five copper heatpipes and aluminium fins within, and ASUS reckons the chunky design is 20 per cent cooler than NVIDIA's reference, whilst producing 25 per cent less noise.

There's a mild factory overclock right out of the box - the GPU is bumped up from 772MHz to 782MHz - but ASUS appears to have designed the card with plenty of room to manoeuvre. Targeting the enthusiast market, the GTX 580 DirectCU II sports two eight-pin power connectors and a 10-phase VRM power design - that's eight for GPU and two for memory.

No mention of price as yet, but we're hearing end of February/early March as a proposed launch date.