A Closer Look

HIS is using five heatpipes on their cooler. The cooler is connected to the GPU through a copper base.


You can see a secondary metal plate once the main heatsink is removed. It provides cooling for memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry, but does not fully cover up the memory chip located below the GPU (you can see the thermal pad sticking out).


The card requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power cables for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 375 W of power draw.


HIS has also implemented the dual BIOS feature that is available on most other HD 7900 Series cards. It acts as a safeguard against BIOS corruption during flashing.


The card uses a CHiL CHL 8228 for voltage control. AMD's reference design and most of the other HD 7970 cards use the same controller. It offers many monitoring and software voltage-control features and is well supported through overclocking software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Elpida and carry the model number W2032BBBG-50-F. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Tahiti graphics processor introduced the GCN shader architecture. It is also the first GPU to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 4.31 billion.