We’ve reviewed quite a few graphics cards from ASUS which use the DirectCU and this third iteration of the well-known cooler doesn’t fail to impress.

The foundation for DirectCU III is a large heatsink comprising of aluminium fins and four copper heatpipes which make direct contact with the GPU. The heat is transferred away from the GPU, through the fins and the cooling fans help to dispel the remaining warmth.


With this cooler now detached from the graphics card we can see take a look at the inner-workings and what ASUS has designed.

All of the components across our board are employed using Auto Extreme – the process which sees the construction take on a fully automated process.


The driving force behind our GTX 1080 is the new GP104 which uses NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture. This GPU comprises of 7.2 million transistors created by the 16nm TSMIC process. ASUS has applied a factory overclock to this card, increasing the GPU clock from 1607MHz to 1784MHz (1936MHz GPU boost) – the memory clock has been untouched at 10Gbps.


Our graphics card employs an 8+2 power design and there are Super Alloy Power II components used throughout the PCB.

Super Alloy Power II includes: SAP II CAPs, SAP II Chokes, SAP II DrMOS and SAP II POSCAPs. In return, by using these components we can expect longer lifespan, better efficiency and more headroom for overclocking.


At the end of the card there are two fan headers. The idea being – you can connect up cooling fans which are nearby for targeted cooling when the graphics card is under heavy load. Usually fans which are connected using the headers on the motherboard will factor in CPU temperatures – this nifty inclusion will help to drive down temperatures specifically when the GPU is being taxed.

So bearing all this in mind, we’re left in no doubt of this graphics card’s capabilities. Over the next series of pages we’ll be running this graphics card through our benchmarking suite.