A Closer Look

The Sapphire Tri-X cooler uses five heatpipes that sit below a copper baseplate for as much heat transfer as possible.


Thanks to two small thermal pads, the backplate helps by cooling the VRM circuitry a bit.


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


Sapphire's card comes with a dual-BIOS switch that lets you toggle between a regular BIOS (right) and a power-limit-increased BIOS (left). Out of the box, without any additional manual overclocks, both BIOSes will perform the same by running the same clocks at all times, which I verified with our benchmark suite. The only visible differences is with our Furmark maximum power consumption test or when you manually overclock.


Just like on the AMD R9 Fury X, a row of LEDs has been installed to show the GPU's power draw by acting as the GPU's activity indicator. The left-most LED is green and will light up when the card is running in ZeroCore power mode. You may change the color using the DIP switches to the left.


We've seen the IR 3567 voltage controller on the R9 Fury X and R9 390X/290X before. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well supported in overclocking software.


The HBM memory chips are made by Hynix. They are specified to run at 500 MHz. The two stacks pictured in the photo are each comprised of five stacked silicon dies, four DRAM and one controller. A total of four stacks are installed, sitting on the silicon interposer (the colorful parts), together with the large GPU die.


AMD's Fiji graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with 8.9 billion transistors on a 596 mm² die.

In the second picture, you can see some kind of transparent sticky foil that covers the interposer and has cutouts for the GPU die and the HBM stacks. I'm not sure what it does, but it's not present on the AMD Fury X or the ASUS Fury Strix.