A Closer Look

Sapphire's cooler uses a copper based and two heatpipes to keep the card cool.


Sapphire has put a little heatsink on their voltage regulation circuitry to improve their cooling. Most other HD 7790 cards we've seen don't have that.


The card requires one 6-pin PCI-Express power cable for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 150 W of power draw. Please note how Sapphire rotated the power connector so that it's now sitting on the long "top" edge of the card, like on NVIDIA cards.


All HD 7790 cards use an NCP81022 controller specifically designed to handle the new dynamic clock algorithm in the Bonaire GPU. The controller supports I2C for monitoring, but voltage control is unfortunately not possible at this time. AMD has promised an updated SDK, but no estimate when it will be released has been given.


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


AMD's new Bonaire graphics processor is built on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan. It uses 2.08 billion transistors on a die size of 160 mm².