A Closer Look

Gigabyte's cooler uses five heatpipes that quickly transport heat away from the GPU core and to a large array of fins above which sit the three fans. Please also note that the thermal pads for cooling the memory chips are located on the primary cooler.


Gigabyte has also added a small heatsink over the VRM area to keep voltage regulation circuitry cool.


The card requires a 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.


Gigabyte installed a dual-BIOS on their R9 280X, a feature 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.


Gigabyte picked an ADP4100 voltage controller for the design. A very rare controller, it is a cost-effective solution, but does not provide voltage control or advanced monitoring via I2C.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Elpida and carry the model number W2032BBBG-6A-F. 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.