A Closer Look

ASUS uses two large fans and five heatpipes to keep the card cool. The five heatpipes, one of which is a thicker variant, provide plenty of cooling to the GPU.


ASUS is not using a secondary baseplate to cool the memory or VRM ciruitry. Memory chips are cooled by the fans' airflow, while a small heatsink sits on top of the VRMs. The backplate is out of metal, which protects the card against damage during handling.


Power delivery requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 300 W power draw. I found the lip below the power plugs (with the STRIX logo on it) to be a bit high, which makes connecting and disconnecting the power plugs a bit more difficult, but it can still be done just fine in confined spaces.


On the back of the card are the voltage measuring points and several resistors, which lets you tweak the card's behaviour, like its voltages and power limit.


ASUS rebranded their voltage controller. It supports software monitoring and voltage control.


The GDDR5 memory chips are by Hynix and carry the model number H5GC4H24MFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK110 graphics processor uses 7.1 billion transistors on a die size we measured to be 561 mm². The GPU is produced on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC, Taiwan.