The board seems to always be running in GPU Boost state, and the TDP is 500W

Apr 8, 2014 12:34 GMT  ·  By

The AMD Radeon R9 295 X2 dual-GPU graphics adapter hasn't made it out yet, but rumors and reports have provided much of the info on it, and now it seems that there are reviews out as well. Thus, we finally have the clocks.

In truth, it's not so shocking that the information would finally come out. Previous reports did indicate that the Sunnyvale, California-based company would unleash the card today (April 8, 2014).

AMD hasn't formally released the adapter yet, but it shouldn't be long now. Unless the reports were wrong and the corporation will hold out for another 10 days or something.

Anyway, we finally have the full specs of the card, including the GPU clocks and thermal design power (TDP), such as they are.

And while we would have been comfortable enough taking the information from just one review (an extensive one too), we are happy to say that there are two such reviews out, and the information is corroborated.

So yes, the AMD Radeon R9 295 X2 graphics card really is a dual-Hawaii board called Vesuvius. And yes, it really does have a hybrid cooler.

Which is to say, there is a fan on the actual board, but there is a radiator as well, connected to the water block / heatsink combo through a pair of hoses.

Each of the GPUs gets its own water block, you see, while a copper fin array is interposed on the PCB components in the middle.

From what we can see, the two GPUs have 2,816 stream processors each, leading to a total of 5,632. They also have 64 ROPs (so 128 raster operating units in total), and 172 TMUs x 2 (352 texture mapping units).

They also have memory interfaces of 512 bits, leading to a total of 1,024. So each 4 GB of GDDR5 has 512 bits, but the total is 8 GB (whose clock is of 5 GHz apparently, 1250 MHz x 4).

As for the GPU clock, it is of 1018 MHz. There is no GPU Boost state here. Or perhaps we should say that the dual-chip Vesuvius is always in boost mode.

Between all of those features, we may go so far as to say that the card is better than two Radeon R9 290X in CrossFireX. After all, the R9 290X only has a top frequency of 1 GHz. Needless to say, the Radeon R9 295 X2 Vesuvius is compatible with PCI Express 3.0 slots.

Finally, the TDP is of 500W, which would not have been possible without the water cooling. Air coolers would have restricted it to 375W or so, meaning down-clocked GPUs.

Unfortunately, the reviews are not all favorable. The card is powerful, sure enough, but it lost clearly to a pair of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti in SLI mode. It's all blamed on the software though, so maybe a new driver is coming that will solve the frame time spikes and negative performance scaling for multi-GPU in games like Arkham Origins and Guild Wars 2, respectively.

AMD Radeon R9 295 X2 (5 Images)

AMD Radeon R9 295 X2
AMD Radeon R9 295 X2AMD Radeon R9 295 X2
+2more