A Closer Look
The core of the design is based around quite a large passive heatsink with widely spaced fins – ideal for moderate airflow scenarios.
There is a single 6mm heat pipe inside that heatsink carrying the heat away from the 30W Oland Pro GPU core.
The PCB is black and we see memory chips on the rear as this is necessary to fit all 2GB on.
Those memory chips are made by Hynix.
The heatsink makes contact with the GPU die through an additional aluminium block.
The card is of dual slot thickness which does limit its usefulness in HTPC type environments. The fact it is passive also limits its use in HTPC environments where case fans are unlikely.
The rear I/O has DVI, HDMI and VGA. The HDMI port is capable of outputting 4K but this is limited to 30Hz. Remember XFX provide additional rear I/O brackets that allow you to move the VGA port next to the HDMI port and reduce the height of the card.
After reading your review Ryan I’ve come to the conclusion I don’t like it as much as you, I would’ve taken XFX down a few more notches for having the cheek to print “The Ultimate Gaming Experience” on the box.
I agree, they definitely should have marketed it more towards the HTPC user. No one will ever buy this card for gaming because it is poor for gaming. This kind of card should come with single slot versions that have dual HDMI and single display port outputs (so it is capable of doing 4K playback). They should be sold as HTPC/Media playback cards.
What I wonder is how it fares compared to the passive Radeon 5550 I have. It’s a newer architecture and a little faster on the core clock (and a little lower power), but I wonder how this translates to performance.