Sapphire R7 250 Ultimate Overview
As I said in the intro to this review this card is actually based on the “Cape Verde” GPU which is manufactured on the 28nm process. Therefor you have 512 stream processors, 32 texture units and 16 ROPs. The card will feature 1 GB of GDDR5 memory running across a 128-bit interface.
The first thing you will notice about the card is the very large passive heatsink. This heatsink runs the full length of the card and is thick enough to make the card a dual-slot card. There are a total of four copper heatpipes that help cool the card. The first two come in from the two sides of the larger heatsink stack.
The second two are part of the secondary heatsink that is on the end of the card. The is a vertial heatsink and actually wraps around the card. You can also see a Sapphire logo on this side of the card as well as a warning not to touch the heatsink until you have powered the system off and waited 20 minutes.
As far as connections go on the card you have DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI. The card supports 4K resolutions (4096 x 2160), AMD’s Eyefinity technology and AMD 3D technology. You can also see some ventilation on the backplate here.
Flipping the card over to the back we can see that Sapphire is using a blue PCB. You can also see how the secondary heatsink wraps around the card. For those wondering the card is 185 mm or 7.28-inches long so it should fit in most small form factor builds.
To take the passive cooler off all you have to do is remove 4 screws on the back of the card. Once removed we can see that the passive cooler sports a copper base and that all 4 heatpipes come into the base. Sapphire has also covered the memory chips on the card with smaller passive heatsinks.
