A Closer Look

HIS is using five heatpipes on their cooler. The cooler is connected to the GPU through a copper base.


You can see a secondary metal plate once the main heatsink is removed. It provides cooling for memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry. The second picture reveals half of an uncovered chip because of size restrictions that won't allow the cooler to fit otherwise. We'll find out later if this has an effect on memory overclocking.


The card requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power cables for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 375 W of power draw.


As mentioned before, the blue switch is used to toggle between single-link DVI with four DisplayPorts and dual-link DVI with 3x DP. It doesn't, as far as I can tell, work as a dual-BIOS switch.


HIS has placed several solder pads on their card for easy voltage measurement. Unfortunately, the labels are only printed on the side that is covered by the cooler. The other side only shows some unmarked solder dots. It seems to me as though the PCB design team was not communicating well with the cooling design team, or that there were some last-minute changes in the card's cooler design.


For voltage control, the card uses a CHiL CHL 8228. It's the same controller as on AMD's reference design and on most of the other HD 7970 cards. It offers many monitoring and software voltage control features, and is well supported through overclocking software.


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 Tahiti graphics processor introduced 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.