A Closer Look

When disassembling Sapphire's Nitro, the first piece that will come off is the cooler's shroud, which houses the two fans.


The heatsink uses a copper base plate and four heatpipes. It also cools voltage regulation and memory chips.


The backplate is made from metal and will protect the card during handling and installation.


Near the top edge of the card, where the CrossFire connector used to be, you'll find a little switch which toggles between two BIOSes. You select between a quiet BIOS running at low fan noise and 1411 MHz GPU clock, and a boost BIOS which runs the card at 1450 MHz, with higher fan noise.


Sapphire is using a 6-pin and a 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 watts of power draw.


The NCP81022 is a very common voltage controller used on a large number of AMD designs.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and are marked with H5GQ8H24MJR-R4C. They are specified to run at 2000 MHz (8000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


The Radeon RX 580 uses the same Ellesmere GPU as the Radeon RX 480, each transistor is identical. The only difference is in the manufacturing process, which has been refined and now happens at Samsung and Globalfoundries. The transistor count is 5.7 billlion and die size is 232 mm².