A Closer Look

Even though it has "only" three heatpipes, ASUS' Direct CU II cooler does a formidable job at keeping the card cool, temperatures down and noise at low levels.


VRM circuitry is cooled by a small metal heatsink which is perfectly sufficient.


Two six-pin power connectors can be found near the back of the card. Combined with the power delivered via PCI-Express slot, this input configuration is good for up to 225 W power draw.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


ASUS has been rebranding voltage controllers to their own "SHE" label for a while so it's hard to tell what kind of controller they are using. To me it looks like a product from OnSemi or uPI.


NVIDIA's GeForce 114 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses the same architecture as NVIDIA's GF 104 but with improvements on the transistor level to reduce power consumption. Compared to the GTX 560 Ti, which uses the same GPU, the shader count has been reduced and clock speeds are different.