In removing the sink pieces we can see that the memory sinks are just sitting on there, no goo or thermal tape.  Nothing.  Sort of defeats the purpose to some small degree doesn’t it?  Now the GPU is something else altogether.  I’m sure there are other card makers that use thermal paste between their GPU and video card heatsink, but this is the first time I have seen something other than a dab of thermal adhesive being used.  Kudos to ASUS on this one.  Too bad they didn’t follow the logical progression of that idea and put some paste between the heatsinks and memory.  We reattached the heatsinks but this time used Arctic Silver as our thermal interface material.  IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP.  Should you do this, remember that silver goo is electrically conductive.  Be extra sure not to get it on the leads coming off the sides of each memory module.  You can swab these areas with Silicone to be on the safe side.

     

Moving on to installation, ASUS puts out a nice driver / utility disk.  They include their own drivers which are a propriety version of the  Nvidia 12.60 Detonators.  You are not locked into using only the ASUS drivers unless you use the VR Glasses that come with the Deluxe model.  

 

The first of the utilities included with the card is the Smart Doctor.  Talk about something handy.  With the Smart Doctor, you can monitor the card's core and memory temperature as well as the RPMs of the fan. 

The setup button on the Smart Doctor provides you with another window and some additional options.  You can set the interval for how often the card temperatures are read for display.  The Enable CPU Cooling option is a CPU Idle program much like Rain or Waterfall Pro.  Nice to see it here but still it strikes me as odd to see that on a video card options panel.  Now I could not find out exactly what Dynamic Graphic Cooling meant.  I can only assume it is a program similar to the CPU Idle program we just mentioned.  But when I think "dynamic" I think about something taking a more active and aggressive role in something.  If anyone finds what this is, drop me a line.  

In addition to the Smart Doctor is the ASUS Tweak Utility.  It SUPPOSEDLY (you know it's coming in a minute.) allows you to adjust your core and memory frequency in 1MHz increments from 180MHz to 220MHz for the core and 420MHz to 550MHz for the memory.  Well boys and girls it doesn't.  I didn't test the entire range BUT the memory speed rounds up or down to the nearest set point which is about every 7.5MHz.  When I started pushing the envelope with the card, things seems to bench out in plateaus.  Upon closer inspection of this we discovered the frequency rounding.  In the upper range it works out that your memory can only clock at 501, 508, 515, 523, 530, 537, you get the idea.  Again I didn't test the lower ranges but I'd be willing to wager that it is consistent throughout.  In contrast, the core speed adjustments seem to work fine in 1MHz adjustments.

Let's get down to business.  

 

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