Sapphire Reference Radeon RX 480 Disassembled

A Sapphire reference design Readeon RX 480 graphics card was taken apart, showing us all of the vital components and giving us a really good look at the cooling solution. So if you want to know exactly what is powering the Radeon RX 480 we have it all for you!

First let’s start with the card itself. This is a reference-designed card so there are no real differences between this card and other RX 480’s except for the fact that the card has a Sapphire sticker on the blower fan. Sapphire is going with their typical retail packaging on this card, with a cyborg adorning the front of box.

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Getting under the hood we can see that the reference Radeon RX 480 PCB features a 6-phase VRM with LFPAK MOSFETs that draws power from a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector. We get an up-close picture of the 14 nm “Ellesmere” silicon. The chip appears to have a smaller die than “Tonga”, but a similar package size. The 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory on the card is made by Samsung. Display outputs on the card include one HDMI 2.0 and three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors.

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Moving on to the cooling solution. It is a large monolithic aluminum heatsink with a copper core, which will cool the GPU. There is a metal base-plate that cools the memory and VRM. A lateral blower fan removes heat from the card.

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The Radeon RX 480 will launch on June 29th and will be priced at $199 for the 4GB variant and $229 for the 8GB variant.

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