ASUS have used a reference cooling design that encompasses all of the major components of the card. The two main GPU's are cooled separately by Vapor chamber cooling heatsinks with full copper bases. The 8 GDDR5 memory modules along with the PCI-Express bridge chip are cooled by means of thermal tape, while the VRMs also have there own different type of thermal interface material. Everything bar the copper core cooling is attached to the internal Aluminium mid-plate with the separate GPU coolers having there own direct contact heatsinks screwed to the same mid-plate.



Line the mid-plate, the backplate cools the other 2GB (8x 256mb) memory chips via thermal tape.



The thermal tape is very sticky and can easily be removed and reapplied unlike the ceramic, flaky TIM used on NVidia cards. In our sample, all of the tape was very well aligned to the modules there were designed to cool ensure excellent surface contact.



AMD have used a 'special' Phase Change based TIM to provide contact to the copper heatsink baseplate. AMD claim this TIM will provide exceptional contact to the cooler but once removed it is not re-usable. The consistency is fairly brittle and was very stubborn when being removed because of prior curing.



Each copper core is attached to a 37 finned vapor chamber, each independent of one another. The chambers are fairly rigid and not at all flimsy but I fear cleaning them out will prove difficult so a can of compressed air will be needed for maintenance.



The cooling fan is of typical AMD design found on many reference cards. The fan will work by sucking cool air in from the centre of the card and exhausting it out either end via the I/O shield and internal vent. Aside from the prior comments about this nature of cooling, noise as we shall see, is another problem the card faces as most reference AMD heatsinks are akin to a leaf blower when running at full tilt.