The Card

Having a look at the video card for the first time you can see the pretty outrageous looking cooler that ASUS has chosen to implement. It's clear that this is an own design and not something that we've seen from any other company. Considering the promise of 23% cooler though, we assume there's something pretty special going on.

The cooler design is suppose to increase the airflow aerodynamics which in turn is going to give us better temperatures. Behind the shroud we can see all the normal goodies that show signs of a good cooler which include a large array of fins along with a couple of heat pipes that help pull the heat away from the core. While it might look fancy, we'll find out soon enough if it actually does anything for us when it comes to real-world cooling performance.

At the back of the card we have two power connectors, one is a 6-pin PCI-E while the other is an 8-pin. As we move closer to the front of the card we can see two CrossFireX connectors, which give us the ability to run up to three of these video cards together.

As far as the I/O department goes, we're not greeted with any surprises, apart from the standard TV-Out port we've got two Dual-Link DVI connectors. Above these we have some vents, which help the hot air escape.

Specifications

Looking below we can see that ASUS has done a bit of overclocking - nothing too major, though. The core has been bumped from 850MHz to a nice sounding 900MHz. The 1GB of GDDR5 memory has been slightly bumped up, too.

We've gone from a 975MHz or 3900MHz QDR setup to 1000MHz or 4000MHz QDR. While these aren't huge gains, they should give us a slight bump in performance when it comes to gaming.