Asus Strix RX Vega64 Early Hands On Review

Up Close

The Strix is almost indistinguishable from their other Strix graphics cards, and that’s very much a good thing. We’ve often spoken about the excellence – in both cooling and silence terms – of the DirectCU cooler so it’s great to see it utilised here. Especially given what we already know of the Vega requirements. Fingers crossed this does a better job of keeping things under control than the AMD card managed.

  
  

Connection wise the Vega64 Strix has all the elements you’d expect to find from something out of the ROG stable. Besides the HDMI/DisplayPort/DVI-D outputs and twin 8pin PCIe power input the Strix also has an RGB LED Strip header controlled by the AURA Sync lighting technology. Next to that are a couple of fan headers so that you can tune the system case fans to the needs of the GPU. Given that most of the cooling in our rigs is all about giving our graphics cards as much cool air to breathe as possible this makes perfect sense.

  
  
  

Showing how versatile the DirectCU cooler is, here is a 1080 Ti Strix next to the Vega64 model. Besides a slightly chunkier bit of aluminium above the PCIe power inputs and the lack of multi-GPU fingers we think you’d struggle to tell the two cards apart. It shows the importance of getting your design both correct and flexible first time out.