A Closer Look

AMD's cooler uses a vapor chamber baseplate to quickly remove heat from the GPU. You can see a single heatpipe peek out on the right side of the picture, used to cool the VRM circuitry.


Power delivery requires a single 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 225 W power draw.


AMD's card comes with a dual-BIOS switch that lets you toggle between two identical BIOSes, which will come in handy in case of a failed BIOS flash.


AMD is using a IR 3654 voltage controller, which is very similar to the IR 3567 voltage controller on the R9 Fury X and R9 390X/290X, just with support for fewer power phases. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well-supported in overclocking software.


The HBM memory chips are made by Hynix. They are specified to run at 500 MHz. The two stacks pictured in the photo are each comprised of five stacked silicon dies, four DRAM and one controller. A total of four stacks are installed, sitting on the silicon interposer (the colorful parts), together with the large GPU die.


AMD's Fiji graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with 8.9 billion transistors on a 596 mm² die.