A Closer Look

The ASUS STRIX cooler uses five heatpipes of varying widths for as much heat transfer as possible.


VRM components are cooled by a small heatsink near the back of the card. The picture above also shows the metal bar that stabilizes the card against sagging (due to its own weight).


Power delivery requires a 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 300 W power draw.

Look below the power plugs and you will see a metal tab with the STRIX logo on it. This tab is a little too tall as it is level with the PCB, which makes plugging the power cables in and out a bit difficult. There is a good chance you will hit the metal tab while removing these cables, which causes the whole cooling assembly to rock, affecting the thermal paste interface slightly due to movement.


ASUS rebranded their voltage controller, which makes figuring out its model hard. It does support voltage control and monitoring through ASUS's GPUTweak Utility.


You will find several spots for GPU voltage measurements and other tweaks on the card.


The GDDR5 memory chips are by Samsung and carry the model number K4G41325FC-HC28. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (7000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's new GM204 graphics processor brings the Maxwell architecture to the high-end. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with a transistor count of 5.2 billion and a die size of 398 mm².