A Closer Look

PowerColor's thermal solution uses four heatpipes of which one is extra thick for maximum heat transfer. The whole cooler is made from metal, which definitely beats the plastic coolers out there. The main heatsink also cools the memory chips.


Two smaller heatsinks cool the voltage regulation circuitry.


The metal backplate looks great and provides some additional VRM cooling thanks to the thermal pad.


Like on most recent AMD Radeon products, a dual-BIOS switch is included, which serves as a fail-safe in case a BIOS flash goes wrong. The two BIOSes are identical.


Power delivery requires one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 300 W power draw.


We've seen the IR 3567 voltage controller on the R9 200 Series before. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well supported in overclocking software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are by Hynix and carry the model number H5GC4H24AJR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 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. AMD rebranded this GPU by naming it "Grenada", but there are no physical changes to the silicon as the only optimizations are in the firmware, BIOS, and driver.