I think he meant the VRMs, there's a bank of them on the back of the card that have no direct contact to the backplate.
DVI was declared legacy in 2010. It's 2015. I was likely one of the first to procure a Korean monitor, as I had to go through brokers before the explosion of availability through eBay, so in that regard mine has already seen plenty of use and needs replacement, but on the other hand I paid significantly more than most people as well.
I use that as an intro because I hold absolutely no sympathy for anyone who purposefully bought a DVI only monitor from Asia to save some money and now for some reason feels burned by AMD.
Yeah my monitor is DVI and I am still fine with ditching it. Everything except Hdmi and Displayport can go away...it's time to move on.