14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices has only just released the Radeon R9 295 X2 graphics card, so you won't be seeing many custom-clocked or custom-cooled models any time soon. Even XFX is sticking to the normal specs.
Well, insofar as anything can be considered “normal” on the new video card. Which is very, very little at the end of the day.
After all, between the specifications, the cooler and the TDP (thermal design power), there are enough numbers to leave a mind boggling.
Since we're on the subject, we may as well provide the technical details for those who want to know exactly what they are getting into by buying this thing.
First off, since there are two graphics processing units here, a pair of Hawaii to be exact, there are, in total, 5,632 stream processors. After all, each GPU has 2,816 cores of its own.
Secondly, each graphics processing unit is backed by 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, and communicates with them over a 512-bit interface.
Thus, there are 8 GB of VRAM on this card, and the combined memory bandwidth is of 1,024 bits. As one would expect from such a beast of a graphics adapter.
Also, because of the combined capabilities of the dual GPUs, we are looking at a total of 352 TMUs (172 x 2 texture mapping units) and 1,28 ROPs (2 x 64 raster operating units).
In layman terms, it means that the new video card from XFX, like the rest of the R9 295 X2 boards on the market, is ridiculously overpowered.
Not as much as NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan-Z, which has 12 GB GDDR5 VRAM and double the price of this one ($3,000 / €3,000 versus $1,500 / €1,500), but enough to still trounce anything you throw at it.
As for the cooler, it's the one leg that the Radeon R9 295 X2 has over NVIDIA's beast, a hybrid model with both air-based and liquid-based cooling. In fact, we have recently learned that the cooler is an invention from Asetek.
In the future, XFX might release a factory-overclocked version of the Radeon R9 295 X2, but for now, it is sticking to the standard specs. We can't really blame it either, not when the TDP (thermal design power) is of 500W already.
Besides, the clock of 1018 MHz is already very high. It would be impressive even on a single-chip card, yet this one has two of those beasts running that fast. In comparison, the memory is surprisingly relaxed at 5 GHz.