Notes on modding HD7990's BIOS

Sharing is caring so here's some info of questionable quality on HD 7990 BIOS modding. I haven't tested any of the modifications yet and even it I did the usual applies to BIOS modding. If you kill your stuff due to a mod gone wrong it's not my fault so mod responsibly.

The HD 7990 Buildzoid edition. Since this photo I've replaced all the thermal pads. Changed thermal paste and changed the mounting hardware. I still haven't done the cap mods. In it current state it did this score:

 So it's already pretty fast. However pretty fast is just not enough. Ideally I would like to push the card beyond 1200MHz core maybe all the way to 1300MHz. Now I haven't really tested the limits of this card. Really that 5.9K Heaven score was me taking it "easy" during some late night testing. I expect to hit the card's power limit pretty hard some time soon so I figured I would look into modding the BIOS for MOAR POWER. Since I started digging in the BIOS I figure that I might as well also look into seeing if I could figure out how memory timings on the card work. Here are the notes on that:

HD 7990 reference
Power limit is set with 2 values
Min power
Max power
these are X% apart from the stock TDP. X% is the overdrive power limit slider

EXP
300W BIOS 20% = 360W max and 240W min
300W BIOS 50% = 450W max and 150W min

Power limits are found in this:


D9 00 05 00 E8 03 58 00 00 80 07 00 10 00 00 02 0A 2C 00 00 69 00 DB 00 05 23 01 0A 00 32 01
42 01 3D 03 00 00 C6 16 00 00 58 01 6D 01 73 01 00 00 A1 01 00 00 B3 00 00 00 77 00 00 00 60
EA 00 00 88 01 20 03 00 00 14 00 40

In this stock 7990 BIOS B3(179W) is the Hi limit and 77(119W) the Lo limit. I assume the current limit is also somewhere in that block. If you want to set a value greater than 255W it would look like this:

D9 00 05 00 E8 03 58 00 00 80 07 00 10 00 00 02 0A 2C 00 00 69 00 DB 00 05 23 01 0A 00 32 01
42 01 3D 03 00 00 C6 16 00 00 58 01 6D 01 73 01 00 00 A1 01 00 00 2C 01 00 00 04 01 00 00 60
EA 00 00 88 01 20 03 00 00 14 00 40

This gives you a 300W high limit and a 260W low limit. Which I think will translate into 280W stock.
I find that the original 179W maximum power limit of the reference HD 7990 is kinda concerning especially once you consider that the Vcore VRM for each of the 2 GPUs is only 4 phases. On stock settings the maximum current through them works out to only ~149A at 1.2V. I think 200A is probably safe however without a datasheet for the Volterra power stages I would recommend proceeding with extreme caution while carefully monitoring VRM temperatures(GPU-z supports VRM temps for the ref HD 7990).

MEMORY STUFF

Timing Straps
A timing strap is composed of 48 bytes
98 AB 02 = 02AB98 = 1750Mhz
77 71 33 20 00 00 00 00 31 62 7C 47 80 55 11 11 30 A7 1A 07 00 4C 06 01 22 22 9D 00 6C 0F 14 20 6A 89 00 A0 00 00 01 20 19 12 2F 36 48 28 31 15

C4 7A 02 = 027AC4 = 1625MHz
77 71 33 20 00 00 00 00 10 5A 7B 41 80 55 11 11 2E A5 99 06 00 4C 06 01 22 11 9D 00 6C 0F 14 20 6A 89 00 A0 00 00 01 20 17 11 2B 31 42 26 2F 15

F0 49 02 = 0249F0 = 1500MHz
77 71 33 20 00 00 00 00 CE 51 6A 3B 70 55 10 10 2B A2 18 06 00 4A E6 00 22 00 9D 00 64 0E 14 20 6A 89 00 A0 00 00 01 20 15 0F 27 2D 3C 23 2C 14

1C 19 02 = 02191C = 1375MHz
77 71 33 20 00 00 00 00 AD CD 69 37 70 55 0F 10 29 21 98 05 00 4A E5 00 22 EE 1C 00 64 0D 14 20 5A 89 00 A0 00 00 01 20 14 0E 24 2A 38 22 2A 14

48 E8 01 = 01E848 = 1250MHz
77 71 33 20 00 00 00 00 8C C5 58 31 60 55 0F 0F 25 1E 17 05 00 48 C4 00 22 CC 1C 00 5C 0B 14 20 4A 89 00 A0 00 00 01 20 12 0D 20 25 32 1F 26 13

74 B7 01 = 01B774 = 1125MHz
55 51 33 20 00 00 00 00 6B BD 57 2D 60 55 0D 0E 22 9C 96 04 00 28 C3 00 22 BB 1C 00 53 0A 14 20 BA 88 00 A0 00 00 01 20 10 0C 1E 22 2E 1D 23 12

A0 86 01 = 0186A0 = 1000MHz
55 51 33 20 00 00 00 00 29 B5 46 27 50 55 0C 0D 1E 99 05 04 00 26 A2 00 22 AA 1C 00 4B 08 14 20 AA 88 00 A0 00 00 01 20 0E 0A 1A 1E 28 1A 1F 11

90 5F 01 = 015F90 = 900MHz
55 51 33 20 00 00 00 00 29 31 46 24 50 55 0C 0D 1C 18 A5 03 00 26 A1 00 22 AA 1C 00 4B 07 14 20 9A 88 00 A0 00 00 01 20 0D 0A 18 1B 25 19 1D 11

80 38 01 = 013880 = 800MHz
55 51 33 20 00 00 00 00 E7 AC 35 20 50 55 0B 0D 1A 97 34 03 00 24 81 00 22 AA 1C 00 4B 06 14 20 9A 88 00 A0 00 00 01 20 0C 08 15 19 21 18 1B 11

40 9C 00 = 009C40 = 400MHz
33 31 33 20 00 00 00 00 84 94 22 10 F0 54 09 06 0F 0B A2 01 00 23 80 00 22 AA 1C 00 12 01 14 20 8A 88 00 A0 00 00 01 20 06 05 0B 0C 11 0C 10 0D

Well that's all for this. Hopefully you find this useful for your own BIOS modding. Though to be completely honest I mostly wanted to post this so I would have an easily accessible online backup of my BIOS modding notes because I keep forgetting how I did stuff the last time I modded a certain BIOS. I will probably be posting more notes like this for other cards.

R9 380 Nitro Volt mod guide

As you all know I wanted to make an Sapphire R9 380 Nitro(review of the card) volt mod guide. However me being me I royal messed up my R9 380 and had to leave for the UK before I fixed it. However a kind gentleman on Facebook has provided PCB pictures. They aren't exactly what I need however they are good enough to do the guide with. Lets get to it.

DISCLAIMER: Everything past this point will void your warranty! If the GPU stops working due to you doing any of the things described bellow I am at no fault what so ever.

So first lets breakdown that PCB into what's important.

There isn't much to modding the card. Hook some sensing wires to the memory and core voltage VRMs and pull a GND from where ever you want to. I highlighted some good candidates in brown.

 

First up core voltage and core current limits. The current limit is simple to disable just cut the 2 traces highlighted in green. Now your card will think it's pulling 0W regardless of what the powerdraw actually is. So power related throttling is history. However it does make it easy to blow up the VRM by running Furmark since there is nothing to stop the card from pulling too much power. This should only be a risk when going over 1.45V core voltage. To cut the traces I suggest digging into them with a needle. This picture also shows how you could try modding core voltage however I recommend that you avoid soldering onto a pin or trace because it is really hard to not screw up. 

Instead solder a 22K(+/-5K) ohm variable resistor from the red point to ground. This will give you free control over core voltage. I recommend not going over 1.35V on air cooling for daily usage. For benching 1.45V is my ceiling. More than that seems to rapidly degrade 28nm GPUs.

The VRAM is an easy mod. All you do is hook a 220K(+/-50K) ohm variable resistor from the pin highlighted in orange to ground and you'll have VRAM voltage on manual control. There is no power limit for the VRAM so you don't have to worry about that. I don't rember the stock voltage of the VRAM on the 380 but don't go over 1.7V for daily usage. On sub zero 1.85-1.95V should be optimal.

Practical Tips
Use a fine chisel tip for all the soldering. A needle tip will make everything much harder because the tip of the pen won't actually melt anything.

If you have a temperature regulated iron set it to 240-250C for everything.

When you finish soldering one of the connections to an SMD component I recommend using plastidip to hold it in place. Hot glue is harder to apply without breaking a weak soldering joint and is very bulky which might prevent you from fitting the heatsink back on the card.


Please donate if you want to see more guides! I can't do mods on GPUs I don't have and unfortunately I'm not important enough to get free samples yet...
If just 200 of you were to donate 5$ I would be able to do almost any GPU you're interested in.

Sapphire R9 Fury Tri-X OC Physical review.

It's hard to see but Sapphire put a small piece of plastic over the interposer to protect it. It isn't perfect since you can still break the interposer but much better than nothing.

Buildzoid's GPU reviews explained

Specs
3584 stream processors clocked at 1040mhz
4GB of HBM clocked at 500mhz on a 4096bit bus
2 8pin power connectors officially supporting up to 375W
Core clock throttling temperature: 85C°
1 HDMI port3 DisplayPort

Physical Specs
length: 320mm
width: 110mm
height: 2.5 slots

Cooling: 10/10

 When I first played a game on this card I knew I was gonna end up giving away points like they grow on trees. And why wouldn't I the cooling on this card can get the same temperatures as a custom water block. I currently don't have the equipment necessary to do proper noise testing but just ot give you an idea of the fan noise I'll tell you this. With the GPU at 0RPM my sound meter reads about 51.5dB sitting 8cm from the GPU. With the fans at 40% it reads 52 dB. At 55% it gets 59dB. At 75% it reads 66dB and at 100% it reads 73dB. I'd recommend running the card around 55-65% fan speed since that's when the noise temperature trade off is quite reasonable.

VRM: 9/10
Core
- 6 true phases provided by an IR 3567B
- 1 low side IR 6894 MOSFETs providing 105A per phase at 100C case temperature
- 1 high side IR 6811 MOSFET providing 44A per phase at 100C case temperature
- 200KHz up to 2MHz
VRAM
- 1 phase
- 1 low side IR 6894 MOSFETs providing 105A per phase at 100C case temperature
- 1 high side IR 6811 MOSFET providing 44A per phase at 100C case temperature
VAUX
- 1 phase
- 1 low side IR 6894 MOSFETs providing 105A per phase at 100C case temperature
- 1 high side IR 6811 MOSFET providing 44A per phase at 100C case temperature
The low side on this VRM is a beast. However like on the R9 290X the high side here is iffy. If you keep it cool you'll be fine but if you let the VRM get hot you can't let the card pull much more than 500W because you'll be risking burning out the high side. There are plenty of cases of people doing this on the R9 290X. The Fury uses much less power so it's not as much of a risk but keep it in mind if you're going heavy on the voltage and not using LN2 because the VRM can easily overheat. Also do note that in certain situations the card has coil whine. Not enough to be as annoying as say loud fans but enough to be noticeable so keep that in mind. I will try somethings with the card to get rid of the coil whine and will put that into my Fury volt modding post which is coming soon.

Extras:
+1 Dual BIOS
+1 0RPM fans in idle 
+1 VRAM cooling
+1 Backplate
+1 Silicon Interposer protector

Overclocking
The highest I've managed to push this card to was 1144/566mhz using Sapphire Trixx. These were not 100% stable clocks. My 100% stable clocks are 1100/550mhz and require a custom fan curve to keep the GPU sub 55C core temperature. The GPU does not clock well and instabilities are hard to catch. I had the card running perfectly OK at 1135mhz core clock for several hours and then it black screened out of no where when playing a relatively light game. This leads me to believe that the dynamic power management is holding the card back.

Conclusion: 24/20 Why is the score so high?
I love this card. It is by far the best GPU I have ever had. It is way way quieter and cooler than all my past GPUs. It's so good a card that I'm terrified of volt modding it(also because the 3567B has the weirdest voltage sensing circuit I've ever dealt with). Which I'm working on as I finish up this review. I don't really have much to say. I love this card it provides an excellent platform for volt modded overclocking.

The voltmod guide for this GPU is now up

Thank you to CoolerMaster for providing the V1000 PSU that was used for this review.

The road to voltage Fury.

So I just made major step towards making the R9 Fury volt mod guide. I have revived the R9 290X Windforce which I killed and managed to get it's VRM under manual control.

Now most of you might be sitting there going DAFUQ How does volt modding an R9 290X have anything to do with volt modding the Fury?
It's simple. The Fury and R9 290X use the same exact voltage controller. If I manage to control the IR 3567B on the 290X it makes taking control of the IR 3567B on the Fury that much simpler.

The first thing I learned about the IR 3567B is that it's pretty smart. So smart, that the damn thing will not let the card run if it doesn't sense current on the VRM phases. With most GPU voltage controllers you cut the power sensing lines and they just ignore the fact that the current reading of 0.8A is wrong and continue running the VRM like nothing's changed. Not the IR 3567B, no the IR 3567B shuts the card down if it sense 0A on the phases. So after I tore all the SMD 300ohm ISEN resistors off the card in hopes that I would remove all power limits. I ended up resoldering every single one of the damn things. However I don't have SMD 300ohm resistors and so I improvised to end up with an R9 290X that looks more like a modern art piece than a GPU.

I also managed to under volt mod the card so it ended up running at 0.56V idle instead of the 0.968V that it should idle and boot at and so naturally it didn't work. I managed to fix that too and the card now boots and runs. At least on stock voltage I haven't tried overvolting it yet because the Windforce cooler no longer fits and I've run out of Seidons to ziptie on to it(it might sound like a terrible idea but the Seidon 120V rev2.0 can keep the 290X sub 70C even with 1.4V and at 55C when running stock volts and clocks).
Either way after this volt modding adventure modding the Fury will be a walk in the park.... I hope.

PS I'm very much aware that the AMD 125W CPU heatsink can't cool an R9 290X however I needed a cooler that could keep the GPU running long enough for me to get to the BIOS and it did that so you can keep the comments about me being an idiot to yourselves thank you very much.


Thank you to Cooler Master for powering this blog by giving me a V1000 PSU.

R9 290/R9 290X Refrence PCB Overclocking Guide

The R9 290 and R9 290X are AMD's current flagship single core GPUs. I have 1 of each running in crossfire and have benched both of them extensively.
I expect that you know what is where in afterburner and you know how to configure custom fan profiles.

Software you will need
For daily use and aircooled benchmarking:
MSI afterburner
Sapphire Trixx
For benching on water or LN2
PT1/PT3 BIOS (link in useful links page)
GPU Tweak 2V (link in useful links page)
AtiWinFlash (link in useful links page)

Air 24/7
The Hawaii GPUs are pretty tanky so they can be overvolted for years without any negative effects. For 24/7 overclocking you will only need MSI Afterburner because going above +100mv on the core voltage generally doesn't help your frequency margin much and is about as high as you want to go for 24/7 overclock. There is no reason not to set the power limit to 150% so just set it to 150% and forget about it.

The Core
Most Hawaii GPUs do about 1100mhz without raising the core voltage. Once your card can't go any higher on stock volts start raising the voltage by 12mV. While voltage does increase frequency ranges AMD cards are really sensitive to temperatures and so the increased operating temperatures can counter act the increase in voltage. This is not an issue for people on water cooling but for people on air coolers I recommend tweaking the fan curve too avoid going above 85C° however if you can tolerate the noise of your cooler at 90% just set it to hit 90% at 70C° and you should be all good temp wise.
Afterburner has an AUX voltage setting for the Hawaii cards. Unfortunately no one really knows what the best setting for it is and I haven't fully test it yet so you will just have to test it at settings between -50mV and +100mV going by 50mV increments. I have mine at +100mv to get 1140/1550mhz on my Windforce R9 290X. I do suspect however that the AUX voltage somehow impacts the core voltage either in stability or how high it is.

The VRAM
The VRAM on Hawaii cards is very different from previous cards. ALL Hawaii cards have a golden ratio of
VRAM clock/core clock. This ratio varies from card to card but is generally between 1.25 and 1.4. Once you find this ratio it will generally allow you to run a much higher memory clock than try to incrementally raise VRAM frequency. For example my R9 290X has a ratio of 1.36 and 1140/1500 is not stable on it but 1140/1550 is even though they are at the same voltage.
While the Hawaii cards do not have memory voltage controls available in any software the memory clock does scale with core voltage so if you are trying to push a high memory clock you wil need to raise the core voltage regardless of your core frequency.

For some reason Hawaii cards don't always downclock  the memory when idling so when you are going above 1350mhz VRAM with an OCed monitor or on a multi monitor setup you will need to set Afterburner to constant voltage. This will not negatively impact the life span of you card because the idle core voltage will still be under 1V. I also recommend trying this if you crash when pressing apply because that happens for the same reason. Your VRAM OC kicks in but the voltage stays at idle levels and you get a crash.

Water 24/7
Do what you did for air 24/7 but use sapphire Trixx to get above +100mv core voltage.

Air Benching
Do what you did for the Air 24/7 but use Afterburner to set your AUX voltage then use Sapphire Trixx to get +200mv core. If you have an air cooler just max the fan speed since you're benching.

Water/LN2 Benching
!! COMING SOON !! NOT because my card does not like the available LN2 BIOSs sorry

Cooling multi GPU configs [THEORETICAL]

Many Crossfire R9 290X and R9 290 owners bought the refrence blower cooler because "it gets better temps in crossfire". This is completely wrong. The refrence R9 290X hits 93C on the uber fan profile when on it's own. So if you put a another heat source bellow it it will hit 95C and have serious issues staying cool regardless of the fact that said heatsource is not dumping the majority of it's heat in the case because the R9 290X above it only has a 2C margin for warmer intake air.
The back of an R9 290/R9 290X gets stupid hot especially the VRM section which is also closest to the intake fan of the card above it. This results in the following happening:

With non reference coolers that dump the used air back into the case this is not an issue because the cards is operating around the 75C range when alone. This gives the non reference card a +20C allowance on intake air before it hits the same temp as the reference design.

Non refrence coolers also have about 2 to 4 times more air passing through their finstacks making the output air of a custom cooler rather cool typically in the 30-40C range depending on load and clocks. Now assuming your case has fresh air going to all areas at all times the 40C exhaust will be mixed with the cool outside air meaning that the top card will at worst be getting air in the 35C range meaning it will hit the 90s. This would look something like the image bellow:

Now I would like to remind you that this is purely theoretical and based on information from around the internet and my experience with my windforce cards. However if anyone is willing to ship me a pair of R9 290X reference coolers I have all the equipment to do full testing of this. If you can ship me a pair of R9 290/R9 290 reference coolers just leave a comment.

Another thing to note is that this only truly applies to really high power draw cards because the blower coolers do in fact keep in case temps lower than radial fan designs just this difference is not big enough to keep 93C cards from hitting 95+C.

Vmod guide for MSI GTX 980 Gaming

Zzolio just released a great Vmod guide for the MSI GTX 980 Gaming. You can find it here and it's going to be in the useful links page.

Air benching my WTF cooling R7 260X

My good old R7 260X from WTF cooling has gotten even more WTF and now does 1450+mhz on the core.

And this is the V mod I did on the GPU. I finally got my hands on a 10Kohm potentiometer so I got the core voltage under manual control. Unfortunately a 10Kohm potentiometer is not enough to keep the voltage in "safe" territory and so the card has a minimum 3D load voltage of 1.47V. The 3rd wire on the back is hooked directly to the + leg of one of the output caps and ends in crocodile clip to allow for easy measurement of core voltage with a DMM.  

                                               Here's a shot of the side of the GPU. You can see both the potentiometer and the crocodile clip behind it

The screws on VRAM in this and the shot above are there to cool the memory because in my first runs the memory overheated and crashed when above 1670mhz. That's a massive problem on a card that has an anemic 128bit bus feeding cores 896 stream processors running at 1450mhz.

And here's the card running in my main system. The Gelid heatsink did a great job and kept the core bellow 70C° throughout my benching session. The Hynix VRAM on the other hand was terrible and kept me bellow the 1600point mark in Unigine Heaven DX11 Extreme.

Voltmodding GPUs using the NCP and PCP 81022 voltage controllers

So HWbot recently launched this. I think the new division system is awesome and as someone planning to participate in division 5 I decided that I'll help everyone by compiling the available information on the NCP80122 controller found on the AMD reference design R9 285 and R9 260(X) cards.

So here is the NCP81022

The red pin controls the Vcore you can solder a 10K ohm variable resistor(VR) to this and the ground to get control over the core voltage.
The 2 green pins control the over current protection. By increasing the resistance between the 2 you will get a higher current limit. The only problem is that you have to find the resistor that these pins are attached to because I couldn't find a good enough photo and because R9 285 PCB designs differ quite a lot. If you want to completely disable over current protection just remove the resistor that these pins are attached to.
If soldering directly onto the IC's pins scares you(me too they are freaking tiny) then find the first resistor that the pin connects to and solder your VR onto the resistor. If you don't have a VR you can try using pencil.
All these mods are universally applicable to GPU using the NCP80122 or PCP81022 voltage controller.

Sources:
http://forum.hwbot.org/showthread.php?t=75953
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/R9_285_Dual-X_OC/4.html

WTF Cooling: R7 260X + Gelid Slim Hero + zipties

Here's a few photos of what I did to my R7 260X after I accidentally used CLU on it's aluminum heatsink.

I will be posting performance results soon if school allows.

R9 290X VRM design specifications run down.

MSI R9 290X Lighting Physical phases: 12+2+3
Controller: IR 3567B 6+2 for the core and auxiliary. I can't find the memory voltage controller without having the card in my hand. You get control over the 3 key voltages and then you gotta pray that MSI's BIOS and AMD's drivers won't screw you over.

ASUS R9 290X Matrix
12+2+2
Controller: A re-branded  IR 3567B 6+2 0.2Mhz-2Mhz for the core and auxiliary. I can't find the memory voltage controller without having the card in my hand. This is the only card that will let you manually tune the controller's operating frequency and all voltages that exist on an R9 290X.

ASUS R9 290(X) DirectCU II
6+2+2
Controller: A re-branded  IR 3567B 6+2 0.2Mhz-2Mhz for the core and auxiliary. I can't find the memory voltage controller because I never had the chance to take the card apart.

Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X
12 total 8+2+2
Controller: IR 3567B 6+2 0.2Mhz-2Mhz. The 8 phase design is very likely not a true 8 phase design and is using doubler but luckily for anyone reading this blog I'll be getting a sample so I'll have exact specs then.

Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X
8 6+1+1
Controller: IR 3567B 6+2 0.2Mhz-2Mhz. 6 Phases for the core and one for auxiliary. Memory has it's own static voltage controller. Unfortunately all the 71A MOSFETs of the AMD reference design have been replaced by 40A IRPowerStages leaving you with only 240A of current for the core and 40A for the auxiliary. The memory still uses the 71A MOSFETs.

ALL other models
5+1+1
Controller: IR 3567B 6+2 0.2Mhz-2Mhz for the core and auxiliary. I can't find the memory voltage controller because there isn't one, no really there isn't the voltage is 1.5XXV idle and drops to 1.4XXV in load which got me really confused when benchmarking Unigine one time.

BTW I will be getting the parts for my AMD rig tomorrow so prepare for even more reviews and guides.

GTX 590 el cheapo watercooling

So this how I decided to cool my GTX 590 for when I try benching it with an addon VRM. The coolers I used are Coolermaster Seidon 120Vs. I flipped the intel mounting bracket upside down removed the PCI-e slot bracket and used zipties to attach the coolers to the card.
Here's a Diagram of all the screw holes on the GPU's PCB:
______________________________________
|1       2                     3                4            5|
|       6       7                                 9     10    |
|                                8                               | 
|       11      12                              13     14   |
|__15______16______17_______18______20|
|           ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] [

The first unit has zipties going through holes 1, 3, 15 and 16.
The second unit has zipties going through holes 3, 5, 17 and 20.

On my first mounting attempt I managed to bend the PCB by tightening the zipties too much. Luckily I just had to redo the mounting. The end result of this is that the GPU takes up ALL expansion slots bellow it. I do believe that you could do the mounting slightly different and reduce the number of occupied slots to just 5 but for my purposes of running the card on a test bench this mounting proved most effective. Another thing that isn't necessary is removing the PCI-e slot bracket because you can have that attached by the DVI ports without having it take up screw hole #1. However even with the PCI-e bracket this is definitely not something you would want sitting in your tower case but it is great for open air test benches and it manages to run the card at 51C at stock clocks which is a 34C improvement over the stock cooler. The other good thing about this cooling method is that you still have enough space to attach addon VRMs like the EVGA E-power.

R9 290X Windforce 450W OC Review

This review will not cover the FPS this card gives because every review ever made does that so you can go read their results.
I will also not give you temp and power figures because I do not have an AC and use a test bench instead of a case so my temps are lower than in a case and I do not have the equipment required to measure the power draw on the 12V rail.

Cooling Analysis:
The windforce 450W cooler uses 6 heatpipes that are connect to the core though a bit of copper that sticks out of the base of the cooler. The cooler use 3 low profile 74mm fans capable of 4500RPM at maximum speed at which point they are very very loud. The fans are angled to blow air away from the motherboard. The fin stack directly above the core has a trapezoid in the middle that forces hot air to come out of the long sides of the PCB. The memory chips dump their heat into the main fin by use of thermal pads. The VRM dumps it's heat directly into a couple of fins in the secondary fin stack. This cooling is sufficient for gaming and low voltage overclocking(up to +75mv on the core) however Furmark or high voltages will very quickly get the VRM to over 90+C even on my open air test bench. It is also possible that the VRM dumping it's heat into the secondary fin finstack and the heatpipes is lowering the coolers cooling capability. I would much rather have seen a separate VRM heatsink instead of using the core's heat sink space for cooling the VRM.
Overall this a good heatsink for the average gamer but doesn't quite cut it for high voltage (+150mv or more) overclocking. So the heat sink gets a 7/10.

I might be able to produce a guide on how to upgrade this heat sink. I plan to mess with replacing the fans and getting the VRM it's own cooler.

VRM Analysis:
-Phases: 5+1+1 phases from an IR 3567B PWM controller.
-Maximum core current out: 350A @ 125C° which is inline with the AMD reference design
-Core voltage MOSFETs: 70A made by IR
-Aux voltage MOSFET: (WILL POST IN AN UPDATE LATER)
-Mem voltage MOSFET: 70A made by IR
-Core voltage chokes: same length but wider and shorter than reference 150nH Magics that are most likely 70A capable (can't get a spec sheet for them sorry)
-Mem voltage choke: 150nH Magic same as the core

-Aux voltage choke: 2 low current 220nH Magics in parallel

-Core voltage filtering: 7520µF distributed over 16 tantalum capacitors (14% improvement over reference)
-Core voltage filtering: 1880µF distributed over 4 tantalum capacitors (14% improvement over reference)
-Aux voltage filtering: 1880µF distributed over 4 tantalum capacitors (42% improvement over reference)


VRM Verdict:
Core: Epic current capability here a full 87% more current capability than the core so 4.5/5 for that but the inductance on the inductors is really low so that's a 3.5/5 and the phase count is mediocre at only 5 controlled and physical phases so that's a 4/7 which is not a bad score but leaves something to be desired because the reference HD7970 VRM came with 220nH chokes and the option to be upgraded to 360A and 6 phases which most manufacturers did.
Memory: 4GB of GDDR5 is power hungry so it should be no surprise that the 1 phases VRM is capable of pushing 70A to it. But like with the core VRM low phase count means a 1/3 for phase count ripple suppression, a 3.5/5 for inductance and a 3/4 for current.
Aux: It's 40% better than reference so I'll give it a 5/5 also this is not a very important VRM.

Summary: There's enough power here that it's more likely the core will die before the VRM does. Unfortunately what this VRM has in current capability it lacks in ripple suppression and accuracy. If you plan to do any extreme OCing on this VRM I recommend you add an extra 2.5V 1500µF capacitor to every single one of the tantalum caps on the back of the PCB. This VRM is definitely holding the core back but at least it won't burn up.

Tuning Ability:
I have a few issues with the new voltage controller that AMD is using and those are:
Locked memory voltage control
Automatic voltage control based on temperature that you can not turn off without BIOS flashing the card.
To OC this card I used Sapphire Trixx 4.8.2
I managed to finish the Unigine benchmark at as high as 1210/1575 using +200mv with extreme visual artifacts through out the benchmark. I run the GPU at 1100/1496 on +31mv
for gaming. With my maximum artifact free overclock being 1150/1500 on +100mv.
The memory clock is bound to the core clock by the following ratio: memory clock / core clock. This ratio is typically between 1.25 and 1.4 and requires that you find it your self.
For tuning ability I give an 8/10. 1 point off for the temperature control and 1 point off for lack of memory voltage control.