A Closer Look

The large cooler uses four heatpipe the keep the card cool. Please note the thermal pad for one row of memory chips, the other chips are cooled using the airflow generated by the fans.


The backplate is made from metal and serves purely cosmetic purposes as there are no major components on this side of the PCB. A backplate also helps to protect against damage from installing or handling the card.


This red turbo button is used to switch between two BIOSes. The normal BIOS comes with the reference clocks and the turbo BIOS with 960 / 1425 MHz. Essentially this is the existing dual BIOS feature from the reference design HD 6970, but instead of a recovery BIOS the turbo BIOS is used.


On the back of the card enthusiast overclockers will find a measurement area for four voltages: GPU voltage VDDC, 12 V from the PSU, 3.3 V from the PSU, Memory Voltage MVDD, 1.8 V DP and VDDCI.


Near the power connectors two LEDs have been placed, that indicate power present via white LED and card running in 3D load with red LED.


The card requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power cables connected. This power configuration is good for up to 375 W of power draw.


The voltage regulator used by PowerColor is a CHiL CHL8228, which is well supported in overclocking and monitoring tools.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's new 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.