The Card
ASUS is using the same heatsink as on the ASUS STRIX GTX 780. It features two fans which stop in idle and only spin up once the card exceeds 67°C. A backplate has also been applied to protect the card from damage during handling. Dimensions of the card are 28.0 cm x 14.5 cm.
Installation requires two slots in your system.
Display connectivity options include two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card.
The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0 compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.
You may combine up to three GTX 970 cards in a multi-GPU SLI configuration. AMD recently switched to transferring CrossFire data via the PCI-Express bus, in order to handle 4K frames. NVIDIA's SLI suffers from no such limitations, so there is no reason to use PCIe.
Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (
front,
back).