A Closer Look

PowerColor's thermal solution uses a large copper base and five heatpipes for each GPU to keep the card cool.


Once we removed the main heatsink, we can see many smaller heatsinks on the card that cool voltage regulation circuitry and the PCI-Express bridge chip.


The backplate helps stabilize the card with the heavy cooler. It also cools the memory chips on that side of the card.


The card requires three 8-pin PCI-Express connectors. This power configuration is good for up to 525 W of power draw.


The dual BIOS feature of the HD 7900 series is also present, but instead of placing the switch near the CrossFire connector, PowerColor has placed it in the monitor output area. The second BIOS is a "Turbo" BIOS that uses clock frequencies of 1000 MHz GPU and 1375 MHz memory.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


We find two CHiL 8228 voltage controllers on the card, one for each GPU. The chip supports voltage control via I2C, provides comprehensible monitoring features, and is also well supported in most overclocking software today.


The PCI-Express bridge chip is sitting under a glued on heatsink which I couldn't safely remove. I am quite certain that a PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express Gen 3 bridge chip is underneath. The second image is from our Computex coverage, showing that chip on the Devil 13.


AMD's Tahiti graphics processor introduced the GCN shader architecture. It is also the first GPU to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 4.31 billion.