But for the R9 295X2 AMD is once again turning up the heat, requiring new methods of cooling if they want to offer 500W of cooling while maintaining reasonable noise levels. We’re using a calibrated studio-quality microphone how to find developers for all sound level measurements. It’s positioned at a 90° orientation 50 cm away from each graphics card. Results are collected after each card hits its peak operating temperature in our gaming benchmark.
Nonetheless, the end result is that each GPU gets the same 320GB/sec as the 290X does, and compared to the 7990 this is an 11% increase in memory bandwidth, not to mention a 33% increase in memory capacity. This new card fixes the heat and noise issues that dogged the AMD Radeon R9 290 and the R9 290X. Instead of a conventional radiator block and fan, it uses a liquid-cooled Asetek system with a separate cooling block for each GPU.
Nvidia’s R337.50 driver and AMD’s Catalyst 14.4 beta drivers were installed. With the R9 295X2, we’re moving to 4K testing, as well as 1080p, but we’ve kept our policy of testing games at maximum detail levels. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure a second Titan Black from EVGA for benchmarking in SLI. Thus, the GTX Titan Black should be compared against the R9 290X, with the understanding that a pair of these cards is generally expected to match the R9 295X2 in most cases. Finally, it’s worth noting that unlike the launch of the 7990, AMD isn’t doing any game bundle promotions for the R9 295X2. AMD hasn’t been nearly as aggressive on game bundles this year, and in the case of the R9 295X2 there isn’t a specific product (e.g. GTX Titan) that AMD needs to counter.
For availability the R9 295X2 will be a soft launch for AMD, with AMD announcing the card 2 weeks ahead of its expected retail date. The good news is that unlike most of AMD’s recent product launches, we aren’t expecting availability to be a significant problem. Due to the price premium over a pair of 290Xs and recent drops in cryptocoin value, it’s unlikely that miners will want the 295X2, meaning the demand and customer base should follow the more traditional gamer demand curves.
- With two Asetek pumps and a 120mm radiator to dissipate heat, the R9 295X2 is a significant departure from AMD’s past designs and an equally significant change in the traditionally conservative system requirements for a reference card.
- But for the R9 295X2 AMD is once again turning up the heat, requiring new methods of cooling if they want to offer 500W of cooling while maintaining reasonable noise levels.
- Any pack-in items – be it games or devices – will be the domain of the board partners this time around.
- In the AMD ecosystem the reference 290X is dogged by its loud reference cooler, so as we’ll see in our test results the R9 295X2 will have a significant advantage over the 290X when it comes to noise.
Multi-core (which are usually dual-core) graphics cards are typically a hard sell, even for a halo product. Most desktop gamers have motherboards that support at least two x16 PCI-Express slots, which allows for the installation of multiple GPUs in a conventional SLI or Crossfire configuration. Dual GPUs may save on PCI Express slots, but they also concentrate two heat-generating chips in a single PCB. Typically, there’s no performance difference between two high-end discrete cards in a multi-GPU configuration and one dual-chip card. If anything, two discrete cards are often slightly faster—AMD and Nvidia have historically run these cards at a slightly lower clock speed to offset the heat problems intrinsic to running two high-powered GPUs in a single card. If we add in SLI or Crossfire configurations, then the answer is no.
AMD Radeon R9-295×2 Review
We know that AMD and Nvidia both have next-generation cards already in the works, but the benefits of 20-nanometer manufacturing are expected to be fairly modest. The 4K resolution is still a mammoth workload, which means that it’ll still take multiple cards to drive high-end detail levels at top resolution for the foreseeable future. AMD fired a white-hot salvo back in 2011 with the introduction of its Radeon HD 7970, which easily dwarfed Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580.
Just because you have a 1,200-watt power supply doesn’t mean it can actually supply that much voltage across a single rail. Some companies ship power supplies with 15 to 20 amps of power across many rails instead of aggregating the capacity into one or two 12-volt rails. In response, AMD is escalating the arms race with its Radeon R9 295X2, another dual-GPU specimen. To begin, it sports Hawaii GPUs that run just a bit faster than the single-processor Radeon R9 290X. ” AMD asks, purportedly referring to the big budget and beefy power supply you need before buying its new Radeon R9 295X2. We benchmark the 500 W, dual-GPU beast against several other high-end configs before declaring a winner.
AMD claims that the Radeon R9 295X2 is designed for gaming at 3840×2160. However, we also ran benchmarks at 2560×1440, which is still a popular enthusiast-oriented resolution. All tests at QHD are run through our FCAT system; numbers are generated using video captured from a DVI display output. Testing at Ultra HD was conducted through a mix of technologies; the GeForce GTX 690 and Radeon HD 7990 wouldn’t cooperate with the dual-HDMI method of getting FCAT working at 4K.
Tom’s Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. AMD also offers a similar array of display outputs as what we saw on the 7990, including one dual-link DVI-D connector and four mini-DisplayPort interfaces. This website is only provided for your general information and is not intended to be relied upon by you in making any
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compare providers. Although I use the Radeon Pro DUO for Compute and Blender rendering how to mine gulden most of the time, many who bought the cards will want to game on them with game titles that supported DX11 Crossfire in the past. I will try wiping the drivers and installing the hybrid once again. I have also checked 20.1.4, in this one I also can turn on crossfire, but the only crossfire option for games is “off”.
Any pack-in items – be it games or devices – will be the domain of the board partners this time around. Also, the AMD Mystery Briefcase was just a promotional item, so partners won’t be packing their retail cards quite so extravagantly. Although the days of AMD’s “small die” strategy have long since ended, one aspect of AMD’s strategy that they have stuck with since the strategy’s inception has been the concept of a dual-GPU card. AMD’s first modern dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 (sorry, Rage Fury MAXX), came at a low point for the company where such a product was needed just to close the gap between AMD’s products and NVIDIA’s flagship big die video cards. However with AMD’s greatly improved fortune these days, AMD no longer has to play just to tie but they can play to win. AMD’s dual-GPU cards have evolved accordingly and these days they are the high-flying flagships of AMD’s lineup, embodying the concept of putting as much performance into a single card as is reasonably possible.
Test Hardware And Benchmarks
Right now each gpu is doing about 10Mhash and together they make me about $3 a day. I was hoping I could get closer to twice that but I cant seem to get much out of it by overclocking. I have the memory at 1400Mhz stable and pushing it to 1600 causes one of the gpus to give up.
Sound Level Videos
Please submit an AMD Reporting Form and ask AMD to kindly reimplement DX11 Crossfire Profiles in their Adrenalin 2020 GUI/UI and also to add the option allowing the user to decide which of multiple GPU to pair up. Please ask them not to drop their expensive DUAL GPU and users who bought into their Multi GPU message in the dumpster with these Adrenalin 2020 drivers. I have just installed the newest optional drivers and I lost all Crossfire capability which decreases my performance by about 50%. PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering lab-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
Temperatures And Noise
As always, the R9 295X2’s competition will be a mix of dual video card setups such as dual R9 290Xs and dual GTX 780 Tis, and of course NVIDIA’s forthcoming dual-GPU card. When it comes to dual video card setups the latter will always be cheaper than a single dual-GPU card, so the difference lies in the smaller space requirements of a single video card and the power/heat/noise savings that such a card provides. In the AMD ecosystem shroom finance the reference 290X is dogged by its loud reference cooler, so as we’ll see in our test results the R9 295X2 will have a significant advantage over the 290X when it comes to noise. Meanwhile AMD is taking the same no-compromises strategy when it comes to memory. The R9 290X was equipped with 4GB of 5GHz GDDR5, operating on a 512-bit memory bus, and for the R9 295X2 in turn each GPU is getting the same 4GB of memory on the same bus.
Those GPUs are unaltered, sporting a full 2816-shader configuration with 176 texture units, 64 ROPs, and an aggregate 512-bit memory bus. Four gigabytes of GDDR5 per processor are attached, yielding a card with 8 GB on-board. A couple of weeks ago, Nvidia announced its GeForce GTX Titan Z, a dual-GK110-powered, triple-slot behemoth. Jen-Hsun called it the perfect card for those in need of a supercomputer under their desk. And using his 8 TFLOP specification, I worked backward to a core clock rate around 700 MHz per GPU.
Join the experts who read Tom’s Hardware for the inside track on enthusiast PC tech news — and have for over 25 years. We’ll send breaking news and in-depth reviews of CPUs, GPUs, AI, maker hardware and more straight to your inbox. As always, the hardware and benchmarks used in today’s review are important.
However, methodology is also more relevant than ever, particularly in light of the dynamic clock rate behavior we described when AMD’s Radeon R9 290X first launched. To dissipate 500W of heat AMD has moved past blowers and even open air coolers, and moved on to a closed loop liquid cooler (CLLC). We’ll cover AMD’s cooling apparatus in more detail when we take a closer look at the construction of the R9 295X2, but as with AMD’s 500W target AMD is charting new territory for a reference card by making a CLLC the baseline cooler. With two Asetek pumps and a 120mm radiator to dissipate heat, the R9 295X2 is a significant departure from AMD’s past designs and an equally significant change in the traditionally conservative system requirements for a reference card. After much consumer speculation and more than a few teasers, AMD is releasing their long-awaited Hawaii-powered entry to their dual-GPU series of cards. With Hawaii AMD has a very powerful (and very power hungry) GPU at their disposal, and for its incarnation in the R9 295X2 AMD is going above and beyond anything they’ve done before, making it very clear that they’re playing to win.