Packaging

The Card

ASUS created an amazing new look for their GeForce 40 Series graphics card. Both the main cooler shroud and the backplate are made of thick metal. While the color theme on the backplate is black with silvery highlights, the front introduces gradients of blue and red that look mighty good. The colors change subtly as you adjust your viewing angle of the card.


The STRIX is much bigger than the NVIDIA Founders Edition.


Dimensions of the card are 36.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 2504 g. The height is hard to see on the photo, refer to the RTX 4080 STRIX review where I've shot from a better angle, the 150 mm height is easier to recognize there.


Installation requires four slots in your system.


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

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. 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.


The card uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 4x PCIe 8-pin is included, you can also run the card with just three 8-pins.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle from the default performance BIOS to the quiet BIOS which runs a more relaxed fan curve.


Near the back of the card you'll find two fan headers that run the connected fans at the same speed as the GPU fans, including fan stop. This makes it a great option to control the case fans according to graphics card temperature.

Teardown

The ASUS thermal solution is massive, it uses a vapor-chamber base to soak up heat from the GPU quickly, and seven heatpipes are connected to the heatsink. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the VRM and memory chips.


Once the backplate is removed you can see how the PCB is shorter to leave some room for air to flow through the card.


The backplate is made of thick metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.