A Closer Look

The cooler uses a large Vapo-Chamber baseplate to soak up heat generated by the GPU core. The cooler also cools memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry. Hot air is blown out of the case.


The card requires a 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.


Just like previous AMD cards, the 290X comes with a dual-BIOS feature. You will find two BIOSes on the AMD 290X reference design: quiet and uber. PowerColor's card only comes with what seems to be the uber BIOS, though it has been overclocked by 30 MHz.

Update: PowerColor just informed me that their retail cards will have both a quiet and uber BIOS. Just like on the R9 290X reference design, the quiet BIOS is limited to 40% fan speed, resulting in lower noise at the cost of reduced performance.


This is the first time I see the International Rectifier IR 3567B controller on a graphics card. It is functionally very similar to the CHiL controllers we've seen on previous generation cards and provides software voltage control and extensive monitoring via I2C. Being a new device, though, it might take a bit until it is fully supported in overclocking software.


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


AMD's Hawaii graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan, with 6.2 billion transistors on a 438 mm² die.