The Card: Naked
As I stated before, the cooler is actually really easy to remove. Here you can see the wonderful design that GIGABYTE has used here to cool this graphics card. (Spoiler Alert – it performs its job very well) I was pleased to see an even distribution of the stock thermal grease and thermal pads spread out to take care of creating a thermal bridge to those other important components such as the VRM circuitry, coils, and memory chips. There are sixteen memory chips all located on the GPU-side of the graphics card providing you 4GB of total onboard memory. The memory is GDDR5 and is manufactured by Elpida, now a brand of Micron, and have a part number of W2032BBBG-6A-F. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective). This particular version of the R9 290X has a BIOS switch near where we are accustomed to seeing CrossFire connectors, just like the other R9 290X graphics cards out there. Using this switch, a user could set and flash a custom BIOS with modified fan and clock profiles and revert to the original BIOS, for example. Like the reference versions of the R9 290X, there is an IR 3567 voltage controller that supports software voltage control, and monitoring via I2C. This is a well-known controller and is widely supported in overclocking software. Another detail of note is that all of the display connections are shielded as well which can reduce noise and interference to give the clearest signal possible.
The R9 290X AMD GPU is based on the recently released Hawaii series which is manufactured on a 28nm process at TSMC, Taiwan. The large 438 mm² die has an astounding 6.2 billion transistors. This GPU uses the GCN shader architecture.
So what about this graphics card’s performance? I am sure you are dying to know; so let us get on with the testing!
