We first caught current of air of an upcoming dual-GPU Hawaii graphics card this time terminal calendar month when AMD teased u.s.a. with its elevation-clandestine "2 is Better Than One" campaign. Although AMD didn't actually reveal anything, it was clearly planning a successor to the Radeon HD 7990, which is essentially two Tahiti dies on a single board, or in other words a pair of slightly underclocked Radeon Hard disk drive 7970 GHz Edition GPUs.

Dorsum when we tested the 7990 in Apr 2022, it was a formidable rival for the GeForce GTX Titan. The biggest problem the menu faced was AMD's frame latency operation, which was quite poor at the time, especially compared to a single-GPU solution like the Titan. The 7990 also suffered from enormous ability consumption figures compared to the Titan, equally we found information technology pulled almost twoscore% more ability.

Nonetheless, putting a pair of 28nm GPUs -- each containing four.3 billion transistors -- onto a single PCB measuring just 12in (30cm) long was an impressive feat of engineering. In fact, this is what made the single-GPU flagship R9 290X even more impressive last October. Although it was built using the same 28nm process, Hawaii XT packs vi.2 billion transistors, blowing the die size upwardly to 438mm2 from 352mm2.

That expansion allows for 38% more SPUs than the Hard disk 7970 GHz Edition, though it besides brand the 290X 20% more ability hungry, giving it a TDP of roughly 300 watts! The card's enormous power depict resulted in a huge thermal output -- and then much then that R9 290Xs oft throttled but to maintain stability. Realizing this, nosotros weren't sure if AMD was seriously considering two Hawaii XT GPUs on a single PCB.

Apparently so, every bit today marks the arrival of the Radeon R9 295X2, the most extreme graphics cards we take ever seen. Information technology's hard not to be impressed when specs like 12.iv billion transistors, 5632 stream processors and 11.5 TFLOPS of compute power are being thrown around, not to mention the card'due south 8GB of GDDR5 memory and dual 512-flake retention charabanc, which provide a full retention bandwidth of 640GB/due south.

AMD says that this graphics carte du jour is "not for the faint of heart" and that users should "handle with extreme caution." The company faced 2 main challenges in developing the R9 295X2: keeping it cool and keeping it fed. The former is tackled by a dual-cake closed-loop liquid cooler made past Asetek, and with a 500-watt thermal blueprint power, the latter is more than like a rite of passage for your power supply.

Meet the R9 295X2

Measuring a motherboard-angle 12in (30cm) long, the R9 295X2 is roughly 3cm longer than the R9 290X and it'southward a very heavy graphics card featuring a total metal construction including the backplate and fan shroud.

Speaking of the fan, we never expected such an insane graphics card would exist cooled via a single fan and, well, information technology's not. In fact the fan is used only to absurd the GDDR5 memory and ability regulators.

The GPUs are cooled using a pair of Asetek liquid cooling blocks, but nosotros will get to them shortly. For at present allow's check out the cards specifications…

The carte du jour'south GPU core is clocked at upwardly to 1018MHz and it's the same deal as the R9 290X... if the thermal load reaches 95℃ then the clock speed will exist throttled down to go on temperatures in cheque. AMD hasn't said how low the GPUs will underclock so nosotros volition accept to await at this when testing.

Radeon R9 295X2 Radeon R9 290X Radeon R9 290
Process 28nm 28nm 28nm
Transistors 12.4B half dozen.2B 6.2B
Engine Clock Upward to i.02 GHz Up to 1 GHz Upward to 947 MHz
Archaic Rate 8 prim /clk 4 prim /clk iv prim /clk
Stream Processors 5,632 2,816 two,560
Compute Performance Up to 11.5 TFLOPS 5.6 TFLOPS 4.9 TFLOPS
Texture Units 352 176 160
Texture Fillrate Up to 358.three GT/s Up to 176.00 GT/due south 152.00 GT/s
ROPs 128 64 64
Pixel Fillrate Upwards to 130.3 GP/south Upwards to 64.0 GP/s Upwardly to 64.0 GP/southward
Z/Stencil 512 256 256
Memory Bit-Interface 2 x 512-bit 512-chip 512-chip
Memory Type 8GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5
Data Rate Up to v.0 Gbps Upwardly to 5.0 Gbps Upward to 5.0 Gbps
Retentivity Bandwidth Upwardly to 640.0 GB/south Up to 320.0 GB/s Upwardly to 320.0 GB/s

As is the case with the R9 290X and R9 290, the R9 295X2's GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1250MHz for v.0Gbps of bandwidth. Combine that with the 512-bit retention bus and you lot have a graphics card that is feeding a theoretical summit bandwidth of 320GB/s to each GPU. That's 10% more than the HD 7990.

Moreover, whereas the Hd 7990 came loaded with a measly 6GB of memory the R9 290X2 has been upgraded with 8GB of retentiveness (4GB per GPU). This sounds similar overkill, but AMD is targeting Ultra Hard disk drive displays with this graphics card.

We've found when using multi-monitor setups at extreme resolutions in the by that the larger buffer of AMD cards provide a significant advantage over Nvidia'southward, which were limited to 2GB for the most part (think GeForce GTX 690). That said, the new GTX Titan and GTX 780 Ti have a 6GB memory buffer for a unmarried GPU.

The cores on the R9 295X2 are the same as the single-GPU R9 290X version. Each GPU carries 2816 SPUs, 176 TAUs and 64 ROPs, and then in a sense you can double those figures for the R9 295X2.

Connecting the two GPUs is the PEX bridge from PLX Technologies, which is the same method employed by all previous AMD dual-GPU graphics cards. Nevertheless, the R9 295X2 gets the latest 3.0 PEX8747 span which boasts 48 PCI Express 3.0 lanes for 96GB/south of inter-GPU bandwidth.

To feed the card enough power, AMD includes dual 8-pivot PCI Limited connectors -- the same setup you'll find on the HD 7990 and fifty-fifty the 6990 earlier it. When it comes to feeding the R9 295X2 plenty ability safely, things get a niggling more complicated as we volition explain before long.

Naturally, the R9 295X2 supports Quadfire (Crossfire), though similar the R9 290X there isn't a bridge connector equally communication between the ii cards is done via the PCI Express bus. The only other connectors are on the I/O panel. Our AMD reference sample has a dual DL-DVI connector and four mini-DisplayPort ane.two sockets which allows support for five simultaneous monitors right out of the box.