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ASUS decided to equip their Radeon R7 370 STRIX with the latest iteration of their DirectCU cooler. A closer look at it shows there is a total of two heatpipes and the both measure 8 millimeter in diamter. The heatpipes have been soldered to the fin stack, providing good heat transfer. ASUS also offers fans, which do not spin, when the temperature is below a certain threshold. Therefore this particular card is inaudible, when the system is in idle, or in other words when there is no load on the GPU. Under load conditions the fan profile has been setup to keep the card below 80°C, which is a perfectly reasonable temperature target. In the end there is a good compromise between temperature and noise level. Even under high load the card is very silent.
The ASUS Radeon R7 370 4GB graphics card, or to be precise our sample of
it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'120 MHz
for the GPU and 6'100 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D
benchmark with 15 minutes duration and 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme.
A closer look at the PCB shows that ASUS equipped this graphics card with
a 4+1 phase power design. The GPU gets its current from four phases and one
phasee is taking care of the memory.
Checking the voltage regulation chip we find an uP1608TK, which comes from UPI Semiconductor. Apart from that the ASUS is making use of high-quality M3056M chips regarding the phases, which also come from UP Semiconductor.
The memory chips on the ASUS Radeon R7 370 STRIX 4GB come from SKhynix and they carry the model number H5GC4H24AJR. They are specified to run at 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz
effective), which means that there is quite some overclocking potential on the memory side.