ASUS STRIX Gaming GTX 980 Ti DirectCU 3

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.

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