The days when Ars would cover every individual graphics card that hit the market are long behind us, but we couldn't resist this little guy's charm: Asus recently announced its GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini, a 6.7" long graphics card with a name that's longer than the card itself. If you want to build a tiny, mini-ITX based gaming PC that can be packed up and carried easily, normally you have to make room in your case for an absurdly long card, or make do with a shorter card with lower performance. By combining a high-end (though not top-end) GPU with a shorter card, Asus wants to give you another way around this problem.

Nvidia's GTX 670 isn't the fastest card around, but it's generally within spitting distance of top-end single GPU cards from both AMD and Nvidia. This card in particular includes a 928MHz GPU that can be boosted up to 1006MHz, 2GB of GDDR5 RAM clocked at 6GHz on a 256-bit interface, and a variety of ports. DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, and a full-size DisplayPort are all available.

While the card is a good deal shorter than its full-size cousins, it's still quite wide: the cooler required to keep all of this running smoothly still takes up two slots, so you'll still need to account for this if you're trying to build a miniature version of the computers in our latest System Guide. It also requires an external power connection, so you'll need a power supply that's up to the task.

Asus has yet to announce pricing for the card, but cards of its ilk tend to sell between $350 and $400 on the market today, so start saving your money now.