Packaging

The Card

The ASUS Dual OC looks bulky and muscular. The color theme consists of black, with some gray highlights. While main cooler shroud is made of plastic, the backplate is metal.


Dimensions of the card are 23.0 x 12.5 cm, and it weighs 732 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. The card's width is 50 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1a (same as Ampere).

The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


ASUS opted for a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, this configuration is good for up to 225 W. Right next the power input is a dual BIOS switch, which lets you switch to a secondary "quiet" BIOS, which runs at a more relaxed fan curve and stops the fan in idle. By default, the card runs with the "Performance" BIOS, which doesn't have fan stop, according to ASUS this is to ensure that even a Gen 5 M.2 SSD receives enough cooling, even when the GPU is idle.

M.2 Slot

The M.2 slot sits behind a small cover that's attached with two screws.


There's a thermal pad on both sides of the slot, to maximize cooling performance.


ASUS is using a "reversed" M.2 slot—the SSD doesn't face up like in your motherboard, but the other way round. This makes a lot of sense, because the GPU's main cooling solution is on the other side of the card, and with this alignment, ASUS made sure that most of the heat can be absorbed by the main cooler.


The quick-release mechanism works very well and is tool-free.

Teardown

ASUS lets you remove the main cooler shroud, so the fans can be cleaned and replaced easily, without disturbing the thermal paste on the main cooler.


The thermal solution on the ASUS Dual uses a copper base, paired with three heatpipes. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the memory chips, VRM circuitry and the M.2 SSD (note the large thermal pad).


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling, it has a cutout for the M.2 SSD.