AMD Radeon R9 295X2

At launch, the R9 290X attracted criticism for running too hot and loud, although recent custom cooled cards have shown that it was as much to do with a poorly designed, cheap and inadequate stock cooler as much as it was to do with an inherently inefficient GPU. Even so, the idea of putting two of these toasty chips onto a single card would have seemed ludicrous to most. Recent rumours and teasers, however, began to indicate that AMD was planning exactly that. Today, we can reveal what AMD has been up to: meet the Radeon R9 295X2, appropriately codenamed Vesuvius.

Click to enlarge

As you can see, it's the first reference card to be water-cooled. It uses a sealed loop cooler from Asetek, with a similar design to that seen on the Asus Ares II. Like that card, it also comes in a padded flight case. Everything about it, from packaging to construction, is premium, which is no surprise – it's launching at $1500, with our sources indicating that its price will approach the £1,100 mark this side of the Atlantic. It's due to have retailer availability in the week of April 21st. Without doubt, at this price, it's reserved for a lucky few, but as enthusiasts, we still jump at the chance to look at something as gloriously over the top as this.

	AMD Radeon R9 295X2 8GB	AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB	AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB	AMD Radeon R9 280X 3GB
GPU
Codename	Vesuvius	Hawaii XT	Hawaii Pro	Tahiti XTL
Core Clock	Up to 1,018MHz	Up to 1GHz	Up to 947MHz	Up to 1GHz
Stream Processors	2 x 2,816	2,816	2,560	2,048
Texture Units	2 x 176	176	160	128
Rasterisers	2 x 4	4	4	2
Tesselation Units	2 x 4	4	4	2
ROPs	2 x 64	64	64	32
Transistors	12.4 billion	6.2 billion	6.2 billion	4.3 billion
Die Size	2 x 438mm2	438mm2	438mm2	352mm2
Process Node	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
Memory
Amount	2 x 4GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5
Frequency	1.25GHz (5GHz effective)	1.25GHz (5GHz effective)	1.25GHz (5GHz effective)	1.5GHz (6GHz effective)
Interface	2 x 512-bit	512-bit	512-bit	384-bit
Bandwidth	2 x 320GB/sec	320GB/sec	320GB/sec	288GB/sec
Card Specifications
Power Connectors	2 x 8-pin	1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin	1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin	1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin
Stock Card Length	307mm	278mm	278mm	275mm
TDP	500W	290W	275W	250W
Typical Street Price	~£1,050	£400	£315	£215

We'll start with the core hardware. Effectively, the R9 295X2 comprises two fully functional Hawaii GPUs with 44 Compute Units a piece and each with a full offering of 4GB GDDR5 (for the full lowdown on Hawaii see here). Of course, this means it will be marketed as having 5,632 cores and 8GB VRAM, but the correct way to think of it is 2 x 2,816 cores and 2 x 4GB VRAM, as the two GPUs are still functionally separate. Either way, it's obvious that there is a serious amount of firepower here. These specs also makes this card the fastest single consumer graphics card in the world, though Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan Z is set to challenge that. As you'd expect, both TrueAudio and Mantle are fully supported.

Unusually for a dual GPU card, clock speeds aren't any less than the single card variants – in fact, they've actually been given a marginal bump. The maximum GPU clock speed is 1,018MHz compared to 1,000MHz before, while the memory runs at the same 5GHz effective. AMD claims that this, along with improved cooling (which allows the GPUs to run at maximum frequency more often) and hard work from its driver team, means it will actually be faster than two stock speed R9 290X cards running in CrossFire. AMD also claims that the best scaling will be at 4K resolutions, and freely admits that this card is overkill for 1080p and even 1440p.

Share on Google Plus

About JD

This is a short description in the author block about the author. You edit it by entering text in the "Biographical Info" field in the user admin panel.