A Closer Look

PowerColor's new Vortex II cooler uses a copper baseplate and four heatpipes to transport heat away from the GPU core to the large fin array that sits in the airflow of the two Vortex fans.


As mentioned before, one highlight of this card is the adjustable fans, which can be turned to move away from the fins. The picture above shows the left fan in the furthest position available. PowerColor promises this improves temperatures by giving the fan access to cooler air. Increasing the distance between fan and heatsink should also reduce turbulence and possibly reduce noise levels.


During testing I noticed some extremely high temperatures up to 128°C on one of the three on-die sensors, yet the other two sensors were happily in the 80°C range. This is usually a sympton of uneven cooler mounting or too little mounting pressure. PowerColor uses screws that stop after going in a certain length and combined that with some thin transparent plastic washers. However, it seems that this is not designed perfectly, I added my own white plastic washers (2nd pic) to all four screws and temperatures dropped significantly, down to 80°C from 128°C. All testing was performed with this "fixed" configuration, PowerColor is aware of the problem and will likely address it for their retail boards.


Two six-pin power connectors can be found near the back of the card. Combined with the power delivered via PCI-Express slot, this input configuration is good for up to 225 W power draw.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


As voltage controller a CHiL 8228 is used which we have seen on other HD 6800 and HD 6900 designs before. It offers support for voltage control via I2C and has some monitoring features, too.


AMD's Cayman graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 2.64 billion transistors on a die area of 389 mm².