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Gigabyte have been using this ‘mythical eye' artwork now on many of their recent boxes. It is dramatic (and no pun intended) eye catching, if a little nondescript.
The bundle includes a software disc, a quick start guide, Crossfire cable and several power converter cables.
The design comprises three fans, spanning the full length of the black PCB. If you look from the other side you can see that the cooler actually extends past the length of the PCB.
The card takes power from two 6 pin PCI e connectors.
The card is Crossfire capable in a 2 way configuration.
The I/O plate has a DVI-I and DVI-D connector, alongside a full sized HDMI and DisplayPort.
It is widely known that AMD Radeon HD 7xxx parts (and earlier) currently can support a maximum of 2 HDMI/DVI displays, and the rest must be DisplayPort connections (or active DisplayPort adapters).
AMD Radeon R9 Series can now support up to three HDMI/DVI displays for use with AMD Eyefinity technology. A set of displays which support identical timings is required to enable this feature. The display clocks and timing for this feature are configured at boot time. As such, display hot‐plugging is not supported for the third HDMI/DVI connection.
A reboot is required to enable three HDMI/DVI displays.DisplayPort outputs are supported in addition to the three HDMI/DVI displays (up to 6 in total).
Gigabyte are using their ‘Ultra Durable board' which has double the copper on the inner layer. They say this lowers the running temperature of both GPU and memory by between 5% and 10%. The design is said to reduce voltage ripples in normal and transient states.
The cooler uses a direct touch principle. Two thick copper heatpipes run the full length of the PCB, straight through the core block and racks of aluminum fins on either side.
An overview of the hardware. AMD’s R270X is built on the 28nm process. The core on this Gigabyte board is clocked 100mhz higher than the reference design at 1,100mhz and it has 32 ROPs, 80 TMU’s and 1,280 Stream Processors. The 2GB of GDDR5 is connected via a 256 bit memory interface. The memory is clocked at 1,400mhz (5.6Gbps effective) which is identical to the reference board.
Well that is beautiful, no doubt about it. excellent card from Gigabyte!
the windforce coolers are great, I have an older windforce card and its quiet as hell.
Just watch out for dust long term, they do gather a lot, and I find they need cleaned out every 4 -5 months under regular use or performance will be hurt.
If you only have a 1080p monitor I dont see any point in spending more than £180 now.
Ordering this one in the new year. superb for the money
Well I’m more than sure that I’ve made a good investment, my country is hot, arround 36 on summer so a good cooling solution it’s a must have, anyway good investment, good decent card, way more cheaper than nVidia’s a power hungry overheating machine, I’ve hada lot bad experiences with nVidia this is my first AMD-ATI GPU