A Closer Look

Five heatpipes transport heat away from the GPU a large copper baseplate is in direct contact with. You can also see the thermal pads for the memory chips.


PowerColor placed two smaller heatsinks on the VRM circuitry to cool it down.


The backplate is made out of thick metal, which gives it a very high quality feel.


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


Our review sample had some glue applied to its coils, which helps avoid coil noise by reducing vibrations.


This little switch lets you switch between a quiet and performance BIOS; both run same clock speeds and deliver the same performance.


We've seen the IR 3567 voltage controller on the AMD reference design. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well 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.