14 DAY TRIAL // When a company says a product will be affordable, context is very important, because certain comparisons might skew perception. That is most likely the case for the upcoming ASUS ROG Striker GTX 760 Platinum.
It's one thing to say the board will be affordable, and another to say it will be affordable compared to the monsters that make up the Republic of Gamers series.
In the case of the ROG Striker GTX 760 Platinum, the latter applies, so you probably shouldn't hold your breath for a low tag.
After all, the price difference will be brought in only by the fact that the card is a GTX 760 instead of a 770 or 780/780 Ti.
The actual specs and components of the printed circuit boards, and everything else, are just as overkill and stability-optimized as on the rest of the ROG graphics series.
For one thing, the ROG Striker GTX 760 Platinum uses a new, exclusive ROG cooler shroud resembling the ROG MATRIX GTX 780 Ti Platinum.
The black and red shroud covers a heatsink which, by means of two aluminum fin stacks (each cooled by its own 92 mm fan), cools the GPU, VRM and memory chips. Several heatpipes (direct-contact ones) lead the heat away from the GPU to the heatsink.
It's a shame that no one has managed to uncover any information about the card's actual capabilities, like GPU clocks, memory, etc.
The reference board from NVIDIA has 1,152 CUDA cores, a base clock of 980 MHz, a GPU Boost maximum of 1,033 MHz, and 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM of 6 GHz.
The upcoming ASUS card will no doubt have an overclocked GPU, but it's not clear if the memory will be tweaked as well. Very often OC video boards have faster GPUs but the same setting for the VRAM.
That said, the things that won't change are the 256-bit memory interface and the support list of video technologies: GPU Boost 2.0, PhysX, TXAA, NVIDIA G-SYNC, 3D Vision, CUDA, DirectX 11, Adaptive VSync, FXAA, NVIDIA Surround, SLI.
Finally, the ASUS ROG Striker GTX 760 Platinum features dual-link DVI, HDMI and a full length DisplayPort. All in all, the product will be a good buy for any gamer that doesn't want to spend the fortunes that GTX 780 / 780 Ti / Titan demand. The price will still be pretty high, though, in the grand scheme of things.