The card
ASUS decided to equip the GeForce GTX 980 STRIX with a new version
of their famous DirectCU II cooler. In case of this card you get no less than
five heatpipes, two six millimeter, two eight millimeter and one massive ten
millimeter. Soldered to the heatpipes you find the fin stack which is being
provided with fresh air via two fans. The fans on the new STRIX series are
designed to spin only when GPU temeprature reaches 65 degrees, which means that in
2D
mode they are completeley off. Also, under low loads the fans don't start to
spin. Under high-load the noise level is still silent, subjectively
speaking.
The ASUS GTX 980 STRIX OC
Edition graphics card, or to be precise our sample of
it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'505 MHz
for the GPU and 2'075 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D
benchmark with 15 minutes duration. With these clocks we had to feed the GPU
with 1.25 Volts and the memory ran at stock voltages.
A closer look at the PCB shows that ASUS equipped this card with a
ten phase digital power design. The GPU gets its current from eight phases and
the two phases left, take good care of the 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Once more, ASUS is using high
quality super alloy chokes. On the backside of the GPU you can find dedicated SAP
CAPs to maximize overclocking headroom.
Checking the voltage regulation chip, we find a digital multi-phase buck
controller ASP1212 from IR (International Rectifier).
The memory chips used are made by Samsung and carry the model number
K4G41325FC-HC28. They are specified to run at 1'750 MHz (7'000 MHz
effective).