A Closer Look

Sapphire is using a vapor-chamber and five heatpipes to keep the card cool.


A little heatsink has been placed on the voltage-regulation circuitry. Also note the bright strip along the card's top. It can be found on the front and back and connects with the main cooler and the backplate through a thermal pad for more heat transfer.


The backplate not only looks nice and protects the card from damage as it also helps a little with cooling by soaking up some heat through its thermal pads.


Power delivery requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This configuration is specified for up to 375 W power draw. Sapphire's logo below lights up during use and changes color depending on the graphics card's temperature.


A BIOS switch is also available. It lets you switch between a legacy and UEFI BIOS and acts as safeguard should something go wrong during a BIOS flash.


This little switch on the backplate lets you switch between running all three fans or one in idle. During gaming, all three fans will be active, no matter the setting. I've included data for one and three fans in our fan-noise and temperature sections.


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 by Hynix and carry the model number H5GC4H24MFR-T2C. 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.