This thing is a monster! It's visually very appealing, as no nook or cranny was left unattended here. As far as the aesthetics go, it has a gorgeous and very quality feeling black backplate which I thought was a great touch. The cooling shroud fans have black stickers which helps to keep the colors uniform and detracts from any highly visible branding that might be a bit of an eye sore when going for a clean look. The heat pipes are chrome/silver which definitely keeps things similar with the color scheme of rest of the card. And lastly, the shroud has just the right amount of a metallic red color with a visually pleasing asus strix LED (white) lit logo on the side. For anyone who's used a reference design card, the LED branding on the side is much smaller than the standard nvidia lighting. It's pretty easy to setup the LED however you'd like in geforce experience and you can setup reactionary lighting to give visual cues for things like boost and temperature.
As far as cooling goes, the heat pipes do a DAMN good job - touching them after doing some minor testing and troubleshooting during a new system build and they were HOT. Those things were definitely doing a damn good job of moving the heat. In conjunction with the triple fans, which I was pleasantly surprised to find had a zero decibel operation mode when not in use, did an awesome job of keeping this thing cool while remaining almost unnaturally quiet. There were quite a few times where I had to check and see if the fans were even running or getting power due to how quiet they were, even when under moderately stressful operation.
Unfortunately, I had to send my card back as for some reason it was experiencing some issues with compatibility. It worked flawlessly as I tested it in several other systems (including a newer Z170 6700k gaming rig), but I believe it was just a power draw issue as the system this was originally going to sit in was a mini-ITX build which has since been fitted with a STRIX GTX 960 that's behaving without issues.
I've been an ASUS customer for many years, and this is just another product I'd endorse without a second doubt. I was heartbroken to have to send it back as it had legitimately won me over in the time I had it. I'm hoping to hold out for my personal build and get a pair of STRIX 1080's... the hardest part is playing the waiting game. For those that want to get a great card for their gaming builds and don't want to wait for those 1080's and 1070's to come out... look no further, ASUS knocked it out of the park with this one!
| Max Screen Resolution | 4096 x 2160 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 7010 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Nvidia GeForce |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 6 GB |
