During a press event in Sydney, Australia, AMD's AIB partners showed off a large selection of Radeon R9/R7 200 series graphics cards, most of them featuring non-reference designs.
PowerColor, Sapphire, HIS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS and XFX presented their graphics cards with custom cooling and PCB designs. Since most of Radeon R9/R7 200 series cards are rebranded HD 7000 series models, most manufacturers didn't bother to change anything.
MSI, for example, showed Gaming series graphics cards featuring red/black-themed TwinFrozr IV cooling solution seen on GeForce GTX 700 series models. ASUS sticks to its DirectCU II dual-fan cooler design. R9 280X Matrix is looks identical to HD 7970 Matrix. ASUS is most likely also preparing DirectCU Mini variants of mid range cards, most likely R9 270X and R7 260X. Gigabyte is still using the same Windforce cooling solution with three 80 mm fans.
Sapphire is famous for its vapor-chamber cooling solution dubbed Vapor-X, which are used on some new Radeon models, including R9 280X. Alongside Vapor-X, Sapphire is also readying more standard Dual-X versions with heatpipe and aluminum fin heatsinks and two fans. HIS showed off some high end IceQ X2 cards, as well as some low-mid range cards with plain aluminum heatsinks.
PowerColor showed a Devil13 Edition graphics card with triple fan cooler, featuring either Hawaii or Curacao GPU underneath. XFX range included all series cards: R7 240, R7 250, R7 260X, R9 270X and R9 280X. Lower end models come with aluminum heatsinks ventilated by one fan while higher end cards feature a beefy heatpipe/aluminum fin heatsink with two fans.
See all photos here.
