A Closer Look

The cooling assembly which holds the fans is massive and made from metal. Unlike most GPU coolers it is attached to the baseplate - not the card's PCB, which might make it a bit more difficult for enthusiasts to mod the card.


Two large heatsinks with four heatpipes each take care of keeping the GPU cores cool. Please note the little thermal pad on the right side of the second heatsink, it is used to cool the NVIDIA NF200 PCI-E bridge chip.


The baseplate is made from metal and adds additional cooling potential to the card. Unfortunately it is required to attach the cooler, so easy access to the back of the card for voltmodders is not possible.


On the back of the PCB you will find several solder pads called "Zone Mod" that are geared toward extreme overclockers. "Thermal" disables temperature throttling which is useful for liquid nitrogen use where too low temperatures can somehow cause the card to think it's overheating. Additional pads are available to disable overcurrent protection and to increase the voltages PEXVDD and FBVDDQ.


It seems the screws ASUS uses are much more brittle than other screws. When I reassembled the card and applied the same force I've used on hundreds of other cards one of the screws broke. Technically I overtightened it, but I assumed the screws would be able to take the same amount of force like screws on other cards. Suggestion: use only two fingers to turn the screwdriver, that should give enough mounting pressure without damaging the screws.


The card has three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This configuration is good for up to 525 W of power draw.
The little red "100%" button you see on the right side instantly changes the fan speed to 100% when switched on. This works without any software, at any time and overrides any software settings.


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


The PCI-Express bridge chip which connects the two GPUs and interfaces with the system via PCI-Express 2.0 is NVIDIA's NF200. It has been seen on numerous graphics cards and motherboards.


ASUS has rebranded the GPU voltage regulators to their own "SHE" (Super Hybrid Engine) identity. Based on the appearance of the chips I'd say they are made by uPi. I would have preferred a CHiL CHL8266 here.


NVIDIA's GF110 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The silvery surface you see is the GPU heatspreader, the actual die sits under that.