ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Strix review - Product Showcase

One of the features  to the ASUS Strix series is their 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 70 Degrees C for this 980 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. This does result into higher IDLE temperatures, but we will look at that in-depth. As you can see the DirectCU cooler heatpipes make proper contact with the GPU. 

Here we have removed the cooler, you can see the 10 power phases that feed the GPU and memory. A clean PCB design alright. That's looking pretty good actually.

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 power connectors. The reference designs all have two 6-pin headers, this one offers a 6 and 8 pin header. So that should allow you to get a little more amperage into the card for hopefully an improved tweaking experience. 

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 980 board reaching over 1.4 GHz on the Turbo clock frequency quite easily, very nice but we'll talk more about that later on in this article.