A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses five heatpipes for as much heat transfer as possible from the GPU to the heatsink. This piece of the cooler also cools the voltage regulation circuitry.


A second metal plate cools memory chips and additional voltage circuitry. Please note that only half of some of these chips is cooled due to smaller thermal pads.


MSI's metal backplate looks great with its dragon logo print and the surface structure highlights.


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


We've seen the IR 3567 voltage controller on the R9 290X before. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well supported in overclocking software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GC4H24AJR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 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. AMD rebranded this GPU by naming it "Grenada", but there are no physical changes to the silicon as the only optimizations are in the firmware, BIOS, and driver.