A Closer Look

Sapphire's heatsink is elaborate, with five heatpipes and a copper base. It also provides cooling for the voltage regulation circuitry and memory chips.


The backplate is made from metal and comes with a thermal pad (marked red) that provides some extra cooling to the VRM chips.


Sapphire's card comes with a dual-BIOS that lets you switch between a regular and UEFI BIOS. In terms of clocks or power settings, both BIOSes are the same. The second BIOS also acts as a safety net should a BIOS flash go wrong since you can just switch to the second BIOS and flash back.


Power delivery requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This configuration is specified for up to 375 W power draw.


Sapphire is using an IR 3567B voltage controller, which we've seen on other cards before. It's well-supported in overclocking and monitoring software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GC4H24AJR-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. 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.