14 DAY TRIAL // The new dual-GPU graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices, called Radeon R9 295 X2, has a pair of 8-pin PCI Express power inputs, but PowerColor decided they were not enough, so it set about customizing the thing. Massively.
It's reasonably safe to say that the PowerColor board, called PowerColor Radeon R9 295X2 Devil13, is the first board that needs so many 8-pin power connectors.
Although saying it “needs” them all might be something of a stretch, considering that the card should still be able to work on the energy supplied by a single pair.
However, PowerColor wasn't thinking of just the base specifications of the board. It has taken into account the people who like to overclock the living lights out of their hardware.
And the 1% of the GPU market with the needed funds and disposition to buy video cards of this caliber mostly have overclocking tendencies anyway.
Still, PowerColor added another pair of 8-pin ports, going above and beyond the call of duty (so to speak). Normally, even three ports are considered overkill, but the AMD OEM didn't let that stop it.
So here it is, the Radeon R9 295X2 Devil13, which not only can channel more energy than any video card on the market, but takes up three PCI Express slots as well. The reference adapter is a dual-slot card.
That said, PowerColor's board is not thick only on the side of the PCB that holds the two Hawaii XT graphics processing units.
The product also happens to use a backplate. All in all, the PowerColor Radeon R9 295X2 Devil13 might be one of, if not the, thickest video card out there right now.
Though saying it's “out there” isn't altogether accurate, since the product isn't up for sale anywhere that we know of, not at this stage.
It's coming though, with its 5,760 stream processors, 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 1,024 memory interface (512 bits for each GPU's 4 GB).
Sadly, the clock speeds of the GPUs and VRAM haven't been revealed. PowerColor could factory overclock them, but it could also let them work normally, leaving overclocking exclusively to the buyer.
On that note, here are the standard parameters, as AMD dictated them: 1018 MHz for the Hawaii XT GPUs, 5 GHz for the VRAM, 320 GB/s x2 bandwidth, 5,733 GFLOPS x2 floating-point performance, and five video ports (dual-link DVI and four mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors). Obviously, the PowerColor Radeon R9 295X2 Devil13 will cost more than $1,500 / €1,500.
