ASUS GeForce GTX 970 Strix review - Product Showcase

One of the key ingredients to the ASUS Strix series is their high performance cooling. Combined with power, frequency, load and thermal limiters ASUS will try to force as much performance out of the card at a maximum threshold of roughly 67 Degrees C for this 970 model card.

The card is based on a nice thin dual-slot dual fan cooling solution and has 0dB Fan Technology. You can play in complete silence because the fan stops completely when the GPU temperature remains below a set level, that is 67 Degrees C, after that the fans will kick in. 

Here we have removed the cooler, you can see the 5+1 power phases that feed the GPU and memory. A very clean PCB design alright. That's looking pretty nice.

As you can see the DirectCU cooler heatpipes make proper contact with the GPU. We mention this as recent finding have shown improper designs, yes I am talking here about EVGA with their ACX coolers. So this is a textbook example of how it is supposed to be done (right) without any compromises.

Btw for those that wonder, STRIX is taken from the ancient Roman and Greek word owl, and means the keenest hearing and sharpest eyesight. At the top of the card you can see the single 8-pin power header. The reference designs all have two 6-pin headers, this one offers an 8 pin header. So that should allow you to get a little more amperage into the card for hopefully an improved tweaking experience. A 5+1 phase power supply is responsible for supplying the GPU and memory with power. One additional phase power supply is dedicated to the board’s GDDR5 memory. 

As you can see, the card has SLI connectors so if you've got cash to spend, 2, 3 and 4-way SLI are an option to pursue, though we always recommend two cards maximum for the best scaling and as few driver issues as possible. Admittedly, the new design looks nice, all dark and red themed. Tweaked we’ve seen this 970 board reaching over 1.4 GHz on the Turbo clock frequency very easily, very nice but we'll talk more about that later on in this article.