A Closer Look

PowerColor's heatsink is using DirectTouch technology and connects three heatpipes to each of the two GPU cores.


Two small metal heatspreaders are installed to keep the voltage regulation circuitry cool.


The card has two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This configuration is good for up to 375 W of power draw.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Elpida, and carry the model number W1032BABG-50-F. They are specified to run at 1250MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


Instead of the PLX/AMD-branded PCI-Express bridge chip that we have seen on AMD's dual GPU designs, PowerColor is using a Lucid LT22102 PCI-E switch. In addition to the normal PCI-E bridge capabilities it can also provide asymetric heterogenous multi-GPU load-balancing - when the Lucid Hydralogix driver is installed.


As voltage controller a CHL8214 is used. We have seen this voltage regulator before on several other cards. It is a good controller which also supports voltage control via I2C.


AMD's Barts graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 1.7 billion transistors on a die area of 255 mm².