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The ASUS STRIX Gaming GTX 980 Ti DirectCU 3 ships in a heavy box with the STRIX GAMING brand highlighted on the right side at the front. A high resolution image of the STRIX robotic owl makes an appearance. He looks mean, just don't be touching his bird seed or you have had it.
The rear of the box has plenty of information detailing the cooling system. The caption ‘Industry first dual 10mm mega heatpipes' caught my eye. I am almost sure Sapphire have had dual 10mm heatpipes based coolers in the past, but we could be wrong. The bundle includes a software disc, literature on the product, and a power converter cable.
The ASUS STRIX Gaming GTX 980 Ti DirectCU 3 is a beast of a card. It is huge – measuring 305 mm x 152.2 mm x 39.8 mm. It is built on a black PCB and the fans are stealth black. We like the metallic red racing stripe that runs along the length at the top and bottom of the cooler. Asus have fitted a high grade backplate to the card with a ‘GPU-Fortifier' to protect the GPU and to prevent the PCB bending over time.
The triple fans are based on the ‘wing-blade' technology which places more air pressure on the edge of the blades to increase maximum air flow without increasing noise levels.
Just to give you an indication of the physical size of the card – you can see it above, next to the Visiontek R9 Fury X.
Thick heatpipes can be seen running the full length of the PCB – these are nickel plated.
The Asus card ships with a single DVI-D port. There are three DisplayPorts 1.2 and a single HDMI 2.0 port along the bottom of the I/O plate. If you wish, you can use all these ports at the same time for triple monitor gaming.
This card is SLi capable in 2,3 and 4 way configurations, if you have a bank balance big enough. Each card takes power from 2 x 8 pin PCIe connectors.
The video above shows the pulsating Asus Strix cooler lights when the card is powered on.
The Direct CU III cooler, in all its glory, exposed for the camera – it is formed around a copper base, with 5 thick nickel plated heatpipes running into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side. Two of these heatpipes are a massive 10mm in diameter. Multiple fan headers run into the board in various locations.
Asus are using high grade SK Hynix GDDR5 memory on this large PCB – marked ‘H5GQ4H24MFR'. You can see a close up of this board in high resolution later in the review. The VRM's are cooled from the heatsink as well.
An overview of the hardware in the latest version of GPUz – as discussed on the previous page. This overclocked GM200 core runs at 1,216mhz (1,317mhz boost) and is built on the 28nm process. The GTX980 Ti has 96 ROPs, 176 Texture units (Titan X has 192 texture units) and 2,816 CUDA Cores (Titan X has 3,072 CUDA Cores). The 6GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1800mhz (7.2Gbps effective) and is connected via a 384 bit memory interface. This is the only GTX980 Ti we have tested to date with tweaked, enhanced memory settings.
still laughing at the r9 295×2 performance on the Witcher 3 hahahahahahahahaha (sorry).
Well I suspect that if AMD were to ever work out their driver-level Crossfire support for W3, the 295×2 would likely at least trade blows with the Titan Z. As it is, it looks just like I would expect a single reference 290X to look, because as far as W3 is concerned, that’s what it is.
It’s an Nvidia showcase title, I don’t expect any better.
Amazing card.
Good deal faster than Fury X on 4K, smokes it on 1440p which is my preferred resolution, good price, premium quality components used throughout the card, more quiet than Fury X.
Good test KitGuru.
They sacrificed some temps to make it more quiet. I fully support that !
i just agree with kitguru. < Find Here <
it’s a dual chip card (so basically crossfire) and it can even run past 45 fps on 1440p that is piss-poor performance even their single chip cards beat it
i am getting this and a hyper 612 pwm to upgrade my currently crippled rig
i7 2600
GTX 560 from msi that broke so gt 730 1 gb ddr3 64 bit from msi is the temp. gpu
16GB ram
TBs of HDD
etc
having put up witth infernal stock and laptop coolers running at 6000 rpm (100rps or 10ms/rev)
i won’t mind the extra fan speed for cooling… 3000 rpm seems to be the max i can tolerate a non optimised fan design but with this i think i can go to hell with the fans… although 2-3000 rpm at max should be enough that should be like 50 degrees right
SIDENOTE: because i have a micro atx mb it does mean the graphics card can only use the top pci slot so it means the 612 would almost touch the asus but hey more cooling right…
cool the cpu and backside of the gpu with 1 fan (+case)
in another review the temps were 80 ish ‘stock’ and 70 ish oc with a more aggresive fan
so that means it would be well under 65 with ‘stock’ clocks and more fan speed
40 fps @1440p is disastrous for that card, AMD are slowly killing themselves because of poor drivers and optimisation. If you look at Tomb Raider which is an AMD showcase title (tress FX first outing) Nvidia perform very well on there. If Nvidia can get their cards to perform well on AMD biased titles then why can AMD do the same on Nvidia biased titles ?
Because tech like TressFX is made open, deliberately, by AMD. When Tomb Raider came out and debuted TressFX, for a week or two Nvidia fans were screaming and moaning that it didn’t work properly on their cards, until Nvidia fixed it in drivers, and lo and behold, it suddenly worked BETTER on Nvidia cards. It was easy for them because TressFX is open, Nvidia picked up the base code and fixed it up in their drivers.
AMD can’t do that with Nvidia-biased titles because Gameworks features (such as Hairworks) are a black-box. Nvidia doesn’t open that stuff up, they lock it up.
By the way, the new Catalyst driver adds Crossfire support for Witcher 3, so I would expect the R9-295×2 to start kicking ass again at that game.
I’m definitely getting two of these. Nice review and great looking/performing card.
Either AMD need to start shutting Nvidia out or Nvidia need to start sharing more……it is unfair on the gamers.
This is what AMD fans have been saying for a while now. AMD simply can’t afford to try to shut Nvidia out, even if they wanted to – one failed attempt could be disastrously expensive for them. And their open approach tends to benefit all gamers when it’s successful. Nvidia on the other hand has piles of money to spend when Huang’s not swimming around in it like Scrooge McDuck, and a veritable army of devotees who would rather a feature not exist if it’s not an Nvidia exclusive. In my opinion, TressFX is superior to HairWorks (which is just “tesselate the **** out of it” written into code) and is advantageous because it works really, really well on all platforms, but Nvidia has 75% (ish) of the market, so game companies tend to do (and use) what they say.
why 4 gigabites from gpu?, the gtx 980 ti should be get 6 gigabites right?
Yes 1440p is great – I have a triple 1440p setup – Dual 980ti Strixii 🙂
Me too – They are in the post (hopefully)