Sapphire Tri-X R9 390X Overview
When I first saw the new look of the Tri-X cooling solution in photos I really was not all that impressed, but in person I was actually quite blown away! The black shroud while made of plastic has a very sleek design and the orange accents on the top and bottom look awesome!
The Tri-X cooling solution extends the full length of the card and is made up of three cooling fans. These fans feature Sapphire’s Intelligent Fan Control II that will turn the fans completely off until the GPU temperature gets hot enough where the fans are needed. This not only keeps your system quiet, but also cuts down on power consumption.
Looking at the card from the side we can see that it is a dual-slot card and has two dense aluminum fin stacks. The shroud actually wraps around the side of the card giving the card a very solid look. The card gets power from dual 8pin PCI-Express power connectors. Towards the front of the card is the dual BIOS switch.
Flipping the card over to the back we can see Sapphire uses a black PCB. It would have really been nice to see a blackplate here. Also you can see the cooling solution extends out past the end of the PCB.
As far as display outputs go you have DVI, three DisplayPort and a single HDMI.
Taking the cooling solution off of the card is actually quite the task. You have to remove a total of 18 screws from the back of the card to remove it. Once removed we can get a closer look at everything.
The cooling solution features a large baseplate that covers the entire GPU package, memory, and even some of the power delivery components. There are two heatsinks on the card, one that sits directly above the GPU and the other that is off to the side. There heatpipes extend through both heatsinks, the center heatpipes is a massive 10mm thick, while the other two are 8mm thick.
Taking a closer look at the PCB of the card Sapphire makes use of SK Hynix GDDR5 memory. Sapphire also uses 16K hours capacitors that operate at a lower temperature and have a longer lifespan than traditional capacitors.
