Expreview members got their hands on HIS Radeon R9 290X graphics card. It is based on AMD's reference design with a wind tunnel and blower fan type cooling solution.
Heatsink is made of aluminum fins and vapor champer. Heat pipes are not used on R9 290X at all.
The card has AMD's new 28 nm Hawaii graphics processing unit in XT configuration. GPU comes without a heatspreader, exposing the die itself. Sixteen memory chips are present on one side of PCB, making a 512-bit memory bus. They are manufactured by SK Hynix and are rated at 6 GHz clock speed. Each chip holds 2 Gbit (256 MB) of memory totaling in 4GB of video memory. Card is fed through one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connectors. R9 290X has 5+1+1 power design with International Rectifier IR3567B PWM voltage regulator module (VRM) and DirectFETs. Connectivity includes dual DVI-D, full-sized HDMI and DisplayPort.
See all photos here.
