The front of the card
The card is a very attractive piece of kit. ASUS have retained the original look of the card without defacing it with pointless stickers. Instead, they have settled for a more appropriate approach of just putting their badge on there. The main advantage of this is that you don't get a tacky looking card whose sticker will eventually come out anyway and leave a residue behind. I'll award points to ASUS on that front.


The back of the card
The card is covered by a tough plastic shroud. In fact it is made to seem almost metallic and is certainly a major improvement over ATI's previous series of coolers. On the back, we can see the metallic backplate and the mounting bracket for heatsink that lies on top of the GPU die. One thing I did notice was that the paint rubbed off easily after heating up during testing, if you check the top left corner.


The ASUS logo thankfully with no other sticker
The card's appeal lies in its understated looks rather than the clear, flimsy, cheap plastic employed in previous cards. ATI must have taken a leaf out of Nvidia's book in that respect. In my opinion, it's one of the most attractive cards on the market that does justice to anyone's computer once installed. Inside, the card sports an aluminium heatsink that contains 4 heat pipes for improved cooling over the last generations of cards.


The two nostrils...
For some reason, the card reminds people of the old batmobile and you can really see why... Anyway, at the front end of the card, there are two vents through which additional air can be pulled. The fan itself is comprised of numerous fins and works up to 4600 RPM at 100% speed, pulling air from underneath and venting it through the tight fins and out of the back exhaust.