A Closer Look

ASUS uses four heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface to keep their card cool.


Voltage regulation circuitry is cooled by an additional, compact metal heatsink.


ASUS installed a "DirectPower" thingie on the back of the card, which is just a piece of copper that's connected to GPU voltage (~1.1 V). The GPU needs to be supplied with operating voltage on both "sides", so the piece of copper is used to provide a shortcut that avoids routing GPU voltage around the GPU. While I could imagine it to provide some measurable benefit in theory, I'm not convinced at all about it providing an effect that the user could perceive in any way. If you look closely, you can also see that the construction consists of two stacked pieces; the upper piece acts as an insulator to protect against short circuits.


The card requires a single 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw. I like how ASUS changed to one eight-pin instead of using two six-pins, which makes installation and removal easier. It also reduces cable clutter inside the case.


Unlike the NVIDIA reference design, ASUS uses a Richtek RT8867A voltage controller on their card. It is functionally very similar to the controller on the reference design--both do not offer I2C voltage control or advanced monitoring and are cost effective solutions.


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 Kepler architecture. Manufactured at TSMC in Taiwan, it is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nm process. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.