ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 970 Overview
The ASUS STRIX GTX 970 follows the same design as other STRIX graphics cards with its dual-fan cooling solution that has the STRIX styling on it. The shroud is all black with a silver ASUS logo at the bottom left and there are two spiral-designed red stickers on each of the fans.
The dual-fan design features ASUS’s 0 dB technology. This means the fans will not spin up unless the card reaches a certain temperature threshold. This means that when you are in Windows and even playing low GPU intensive games your graphics card will be completely silent.
This is a dual-slot card and the large heatpipes can be seen coming out from both the bottom and top of the card. ASUS has custom-designed the PCB of this card and a few changes were made. They have changed out the dual 6pin PCI-Express connectors and have gone with a single 8pin connector. The PCB area where the SLI connectors are has been raised to make it easier to connect your SLI bridges.
ASUS has also gone and changed the display port configuration. So here you have DVI-D, DVI-I, HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2. There is also a small exhaust section.
Flipping the card over we can see that ASUS has used their own brushed aluminum backplate on the card that has both the ASUS logo and a DirectCU II logo. In this shot we can also see how far the SLI fingers stick out and the two LEDs on the PCI-Express power connector that will show if the card has correct power or not (white for yes, red for no).
Removing the cooling solution from the card is as easy as taking out four screws on the back of the card. We do not suggest you do this as you will be voiding your warranty.
Taking a closer look at the DirectCU II cooling solution we can see that it is made up of two large aluminum heatsink stacks, two smaller heatpipes and a single larger one. All three copper heatpipes make proper direct contact with the GPU.
As we look at the GPU package we can see that ASUS has gone with Samsung GDDR5 memory.
As we mentioned ASUS has gone with their own custom design on this board. It has a 6-phase power design for the GPU and memory. ASUS says their DIGI+VRM with Super Alloy power design creates 30% less power noise and has 2.5X greater durability than reference designs.
