A Closer Look

ASUS is one of the first companies to adapt the Direct-Touch heatpipe system on a VGA cooler. You can see the two copper heatpipes that sit right above the GPU core. They have been milled flat to make optimum contact with the die.


After removing the main heatsink you are still left with one heatsink sitting on the voltage regulator circuitry.


The VRM heatsink is just a simple metal heatsink - plenty for the cooling requirements of the PWM phases.


ASUS has decided to put one six-pin and one eight-pin connector on their card. In our power testing we saw a maximum power draw of 146W, so this is mostly for show.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 2500 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


The GPU voltage is managed by a uP6208 voltage controller, which does support I2C software voltage control with up to ~1.8V. The bundled ASUS SmartDoctor utility supports software voltage control up to 1.35V. Our latest GPU-Z 0.3.9 can also monitor this voltage regulator, but not as detailed as Volterra controllers for example.


This is AMD's Cypress GPU, it comes with a whopping 2154 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The Cypress die size is 334 mm². Compared to the GPU on the HD 5850 and HD 5870 this is exactly the same GPU, just with some features disabled.