A Closer Look

The cooler uses two fans and five heatpipes, one of which is a "fat" variant for more heat transfer.


MSI has also added a baseplate to the card. It cools voltage regulation circuitry and memory.


The card requires a 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 375 W of power draw.


MSI has installed a dual-BIOS feature on the R9 280X GAMING, a feature that we've seen on many HD 7900 Series cards before. It comes in extremely handy when a BIOS flash goes wrong. Just switch to the other BIOS to recover.


The same CHiL CHL8228 as on many HD 7900 Series cards is used as a voltage controller. It offers software voltage control and monitoring, and is well supported by most software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by SK Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Tahiti graphics processor was the first chip to use the GCN shader architecture. It is also the first GPU to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 4.31 billion.