A Closer Look

The cooler uses two fans and five heatpipes, one of which is a "fat" variant for more heat transfer.


While the original 3 GB version had no backplate, the 6 GB card reviewed today comes with a backplate, with thermal tape where the VRM circuitry is situated on the other side of the PCB. This approach should reduce VRM temperatures a bit.


With the primary heatsink removed, you can see two secondary heatplates that sit on the voltage regulation circuitry and cool most of the memory chips. One memory chip remains uncooled, but its position is covered by the airflow the cooling assembly produces.


Power delivery requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 300 W power draw.


The card's dual-BIOS feature is used to switch between the normal and a UEFI optimized BIOS. Both BIOSes are the same in terms of clocks, voltages, fan speed, etc.


This is the first time I see the IR 3563 voltage controller on a R9 280X. I previously saw it on MSI's R9 270X HAWK, though. It supports software control and monitoring via I2C, but due to it being rather rare, OC software might not support it as well as other controllers.


The GDDR5 memory chips are by Elpida and carry the model number W4032BABG-60-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.