A Closer Look

The cooler is fairly simple compared to cards like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280. It uses a full copper design and cools all the important components on the card. If you compare this cooler to the cooler on the MSI card which we reviewed today too, you can see minor differences in the baseplate, it seems there are two revisions of the cooler with small differences.


The CrossFire connector is covered by a plastic cap which is slightly more useful than the covers on the DVI outputs. You can use two, three or four of these cards in CrossFire to build an even more powerful rig.


Power to the card is supplied via 6-pin PCI-Express power connector, the card will not POST without power connected to it.


The GDDR3 chips are made by Qimonda (formerly Infineon) and have the model number HYB18H512321BF-10. The chips are rated at 1.0 ns (= 1000 MHz) which is pretty much what we saw during overclocking.


Unlike the NVIDIA GT200, the AMD RV770 GPU is not that big with a die size of 256 mm². Just like all other ATI GPUs the GPU is made at TSMC in a 55nm process.