A Closer Look

Five heatpipes transport heat away from the GPU. You can also see thermal pads for the memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


A secondary heatsink is placed below the main cooler and cools memory chips that are not covered by the main cooler.


The backplate protect the card against damage during handling and has a thermal pad that sits on the opposite side of the VRM circuitry to soak up some extra heat.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw. Please note the heatsink fins right below the power plugs. These leave very little clearance, so once you plug in the power cables, it's extremely difficult to get them out because you can't press down on the little plastic tab.


This little switch lets you switch between a UEFI-enabled BIOS and a legacy BIOS. Unlike the AMD reference design, there is no quiet and performance BIOS. Both BIOSes run the same clock speeds and fan settings. The sample we received from MSI was running a special reviewer BIOS with higher clock speeds out of the box that match those of the MSI Gaming App after you pick performance clocks. For all our testing, I flashed back to the normal retail BIOS to provide a realistic assessment of the card.


We've seen the IR 3567 voltage controller on the AMD reference design. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well supported in overclocking software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by SK Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Hawaii graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with 6.2 billion transistors on a 438 mm² die.