A Closer Look

The ASUS heatsink looks massive. It uses five heatpipes to keep the card cool, with an extra-wide heatpipe for maximum heat transfer.


A little heatsink is placed on the VRM circuitry, and the whole card is stabilized by a metal tab running along the longest side of the board. You'll find a metal backplate on the back of the card. A welcome addition, it protects the card against damage during handling.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.


This little switch lets you switch between a quiet BIOS and a performance BIOS, just like on the original AMD R9 290X reference board. Our testing saw no performance difference between these BIOSes, which is good. You basically pick either higher temps and lower noise or lower temps and more noise, with the second option still quieter than the AMD reference design.


ASUS placed several voltage measurement points near the back of the card for die-hard voltmodders.


The voltage controller has been re-branded by ASUS. I suspect it's a CHiL variant. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via the I2C bus.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Elpida and carry the model number W2032BBBG-6A-F. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Hawaii graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with 6.2 billion transistors on a 438 mm² die.