A Closer Look

ASUS is using a three heatpipe DirectTouch cooler to keep the card cool. Two of the heatipes are double length for extra cooling performance.


After removing the main cooler, we find an additional small heatsink on the card which cools voltage regulation circuitry.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power cables for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw.
Please note that the power plugs are reversed, which is an improvement over the GTX 670. If you look below the power plugs on the GTX 670, you can see a piece of silvery metal with a screw in it which makes connecting and disconnecting power-cables on the GTX 670 a bit difficult. Rotating the connectors, like on this card, solves this problem elegantly.


For voltage control, the card uses an unknown voltage controller which has been rebranded to ASUS Digi+. My best guess is that it is a rebranded CHiL 8318, like on other GTX 600 cards by ASUS.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK104 graphics processor introduced the company's brand-new Kepler architecture. It is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.