When it comes to beautiful pieces of kit, ASUS tends to be something of a gem. They really do understand what the gamer wants and why they want it to at least look as good as its performance. Their latest graphics card – the ASUS Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II – comes with two cooling fans, four nickel-plated heat pipes and bunch of teaser images.
The card has ASUS GPU Tweak with instant tuning tools to optimise performance, but if you are an ASUS card user, then you already know that. You get support, obviously, for DirectX 11,2 and the new Mantle application programming interface from AMD. Basically, this card is capable of taking on quite a lot of gaming whack and making it beautiful.
Want some more specifications?
There is PCI Express 3.0, OpenGL 4.3, 4096MB DDR5 memory, 1000Mhz core speed, 2816 stream processors, 5000MHz memory clock, DVI-/DVI-D output, HDMI output and a free full game in the box of the ASUS Radeon R9 290X-G-4GD5 DirectCU II. Now, how is that for a Christmas present this year?
The ASUS Radeon R9 290X-4GD5 DirectCU II graphics card has a slightly different specification set that has the same PCI Express, same OpenGL and GDDR5 memory and core speed, but there is no sign of the free game. So yeah, I’d get the first one personally.
You get AMD TrueAudio technology and a dedicated digital signal processor built into the GPU along with unbelievable potential to customise this card to suit your needs.
Tamsin