ASUS has recently made an announcement for its Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II series of graphic cards, and this series will incorporate a model that is going to stick to the AMD-reference clocks (which can go up to a 1000 MHz core, 5.00 GHz memory). Another model will also form part of this series and it is the one that offers factory overclocked speeds of up to 1050 MHz core, and 5.40 GHz memory and this one is the DirectCU II OC. The card is going to come with a design which is completely non-reference, and has a PCB designed in-house by ASUS. This features a 10-stage VRM, which is capable of drawing power from a fusion of 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors and also featuring the Samsung-made GDDR5 memory chips. The 4 GB memory inside has been laid across a 512 bit interface.
The series are going to feature the DirectCU II cooling solution which is quite similar to the one that was used for the Geforce GtX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC which only launched recently. The cooling solution is made up of the large aluminum fin-stack heatsink and all the heat is fed into this heat sink through the 8 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes which aid in the process quite efficiently. For the ventilation of the heat sink, there are a couple of 92 mm fans, and one of these features the Asus’ quite unique lateral+axial hybrid impeller, called the CoolTech fan.