A Closer Look

ASUS's thermal solution uses five heatpipes; four of these directly touch the GPU surface. You can also see a grey thermal pad that cools the voltage regulation circuitry.


Once the main cooler is removed, a shiny metal bar becomes visible; it provides cooling for the memory chips.


"Hold on, not so fast" I hear you say, what about those two orphaned thermal pads in the photos above? Well, they provide cooling for the memory chips not covered by the metal bar. I took some closeups and they make contact with the heatpipes. Even though it's not a lot, going by the indentations in the pads, it should be enough - the GDDR5X chips don't produce much heat anyway.


The backplate is made out of metal and has an RGB LED module that illuminates the ROG logo.


Near the back of the card are two fan connectors that are in sync with the GPU's fans. You could hook up two case fans that will stop completely outside of games. The main source of heat nowadays being the graphics card, attached case fans will run at the same speed as the GPU's fans that base their speed on how hot the card runs. A great idea!


ASUS has also included what look to be solder OC tweaking points. They are not marked, so it'll be up to the overclockers to figure out what they do.


ASUS has upgraded the power input of their GTX 1080 to an 8-pin and a 6-pin. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 watts of power draw.


NVIDIA's Pascal is introducing a new voltage controller by uPI, the uP 9511P. Its exact feature set is currently unknown.


The GDDR5X memory chips are made by Micron and are marked with "D9TXS," which decodes to MT58K256M32JA-100. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (10,000 MHz GDDR5X effective).


NVIDIA's GP104 graphics processor is the first consumer chip using the Pascal architecture. It is produced on a 16 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with a transistor count of 7.1 billion and a die size of 314 mm².