A Closer Look

As first step we removed the metal backplate of the card. It feels quite solid and thermal pads have been strategically placed to transfer heat from the GPU and memory to the plate. Please note that once you remove the screws from this backplate, the cooler on the front will also get loose.


The front cooler uses DirectTouch technology combined with five copper heatpipes to transfer heat away quickly from the GPU core.


This little chip is responsible for interfacing with the ASUS software and provides a means to adjust some additional voltages like VDDCI and MVDDC (the VDDC GPU voltage regulator can be programmed directly).


A shiny metal SuperML capacitor has been added to the card to help with voltage stability. It's essentially a high (relative to normal capacitors) capacity battery that can quickly charge and discharge to smooth out any ripples in the GPU voltage.


If you take a look at the picture above, you can see that the row of memory chips on the left makes contact with the heatsink via thermal pad. The row on the front doesn't have such a pad because they are located right above where the heatpipes go through. ASUS tells me that this is no problem because there is some airflow leakage from the fan moving hot air out of the case that cools it.


ASUS has placed dual 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors on their card, they are definitely not needed, as the power consumption is reasonable - 222W worst case. Two 8-pin power connectors are required only for designs going far beyond 300W. Even when doing serious overclocking I have doubts that there is any difference, it's still a good marketing feature though.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


GPU voltage is managed by a uPi uP6208 AM voltage regulator which has I2C software control. While it does not have as many features as the controllers from Volterra, it is certainly a cost effective solution that does the job just fine. The other two controllers are uP6205 to generate VDDCI and MVDDC. They do not support I2C control, so ASUS is using their Super Hybrid Engine chip as interface to control those.


This is AMD's Cypress GPU, it comes with a whopping 2154 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TMSC Taiwan. The Cypress die size is 334 mm².