A Closer Look

The ASUS cooler uses two heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. An additional VRM heatsink like on the Sapphire HD 7790 has not been installed. The memory chips are also not cooled by the heatsink.


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. The length of the cooler makes plugging a power cable in a bit difficult, especially in small cases. ASUS has, however, flipped the power connector to make it a bit easier.


All HD 7790 cards use a NCP81022 controller, which is 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 has given no estimate as to when it will be released.


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.