A Closer Look

PowerColor's cooler uses six heatpipes. Two of these are twice as long as the others.


The memory chips are covered by small metal heatsinks, and two small heatsinks sit on the VRM circuitry. All of these are permanently glued on, so I couldn't remove them.


The card requires one 6-pin PCI-Express power cable for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 150 W of power draw. There is enough clearance to easily plug the cable in and out.


PowerColor has chosen a cost-efficient NCP5395 as the voltage regulator. Compared to the CHiL solution that we've seen on other HD 7800 Series cards, it lacks software voltage control and monitoring features.


Due to the heatsinks being glued to the memory chips, we do not know which exact chips are used. My best guess is that these are Elpida chips because Samsung and Hynix ones overclock much better.


AMD's Pitcairn graphics processor completes the AMD 28 nm GPU stack. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, with a transistor count of 2.8 billion.