A Closer Look

As you can see, the cooler reminds more of NVIDIA's latest designs. It cools both the memory and the GPU. In the middle of the cooler base sits the copper Vapor-X cooling plate.


The voltage regulation circuitry is cooled by an additional metal heatsink which sits in the airflow of the main cooler.


Instead of two six pin power connectors, Sapphire has chosen to use a six pin and one eight pin connector. You must connect 6+8, just using two six pin power connectors will not work.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry the model number IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X. With a cycle time of 1.0 ns, they are specified to run at 1000 MHz.


Sapphire uses an ATI reference PCB which means that the dual Volterra voltage regulators are present. They allow software control of the output voltage which means this card allows easy voltmodding for increased overclocking. One voltage regulator controls the GPU voltage, while the other controls the memory voltage.


This is AMD's RV790 GPU. It is identical to RV770, except for improved signal routing which allows higher operating frequencies. It is made on a 55 nm process at TSMC Taiwan, the 959 million transistors occupy 282 mm² of die area.