Cost effective ‘Tahiti’ PCB final design spotted

The Chinese brand Yeston have been working on and are finalising the design of a more ‘cost-effective’ PCB for reference AMD HD 7950/7970 graphics cards. The board features cheaper components, where possible less components or some might say unnecessary components. Yeston are adamant that these measures will not degrade quality or performance of the card at all.

It is quite likely that this PCB will be used for Radeon HD 7950, apart from affordable HD 7970 cards. Radeon HD 7950, like its costlier sibling, will have a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. Its designers seems to have done some clever cost-cutting which will make cards based on it more affordable (or at least more profitable), without sacrificing quality much. The PCB uses a 8+1+1 phase VRM, consisting of cost-effective ferrite core chokes, LFPAK MOSFETs, and probably a UPI-made VRM controller. Yeston will most likely use a top-flow cooler, and hence made room for two DVI connectors next to one each of HDMI 1.4a and standard DisplayPort 1.2. The dual-BIOS feature of AMD’s high-end reference HD 7970 PCB is blanked out on this PCB.

Source: Expreview, TPU