ASUS GeForce GTS 450 DirectCU OC Overview
When you first take the card out you will notice ASUS has gone with a black PCB.  This not only looks cool, but it also matches the black shroud on the cooler.  This card is a little bit longer than the reference card with a length of about 9.25-inches.

The black shroud is actually part of ASUS’s DirectCU cooler.  From our review of the ASUS HD 6870 DirectCU we already know this cooler performs much better than the reference designed coolers.  Because this is an Nvidia-based card ASUS has changed the stripes on the shroud to green.  A small fan does most of the cooling for you.

The cooler itself is a direct heatpipe cooler made up of 2 large copper heatpipes.  These heatpipes make direct contact with the GPU then go up in to the heatsink stack to dissipate heat.  Another thing that you will notice is that on the one side of the card there is an aluminum strip.  This helps keeps the card more solid.  On the same side of the card is the 6pin PCI-E power connector.

The VRM’s on the card are cooled by a large aluminum heatsink.  As far as connections go on the card you have HDMI, VGA and DVI.  This is also a dual-slot card.