Asus has taken the wraps off its latest graphics card product: the Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini, a compact board designed specifically for mini-ITX gaming builds.Revealed late yesterday on the company's Republic of Gamers site, the new board takes the compact board of Nvidia's GTX 670 reference design - just 17.5cm along its length - and pairs it with an ultra-compact version of the Asus DirectCU heatsink for a small form factor-appropriate yet surprisingly powerful graphics card.Beneath the custom-design single-fan DirectCU Mini vapour-chamber based cooling system, which still takes up two slots despite its lack of length, is a pretty standard Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 board - aside from the use of Asus' Super Alloy Power components, which it claims offers a lifespan some two and a half times greater than Nvidia's reference components. As a result, gamers looking for a compact design will find themselves with a board featuring 1,344 CUDA cores from a GK104 Kepler GPU, 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, and support for up to four displays natively through dual DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.If you're hoping for pricing and release information, however, you're going to be disappointed: currently, Asus has but a single prototype sample of the system, which it explains is still undergoing design tweaks and testing prior to launch. With no mass production yet on schedule, it could be a while before the compact graphics card hits the open market - even allowing for the use of a fairly stock Nvidia PCB beneath the clever custom cooler.When it finally does launch, however, it will have some competition: rival graphics card maker Zotac announced its own mini-ITX-friendly Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 in June last year, using a modified TwinCooler heatsink featuring two 80mm fans. Sadly, though, this board was only ever released in Japan and China, while its dual-fan design means that Asus may, depending on how clever it has been with its single-fan design, have the edge in noise levels.