Fully drenched in liquid cooler, the Balrog knows no bounds

Jun 18, 2015 16:04 GMT  ·  By

A day after the AMD E3 conference, details about the tech inside Project Quantum that sent shockwaves around the industry, finally have surfaced. Powered by double Fiji GPUs on one single PCB, the monster we dubbed "Balrog" from Tolkien's mythology spews fire and metal, and it has at least nine times more performance than your average console.

However, now we have the entire spec list of the beast. Packing 17 TFlops of computational power, with dual Fiji GPU with 8192 Stream Processor and 8k-bit memory interface, it doubles everything from Titan X to AMD's own R9 Fury X. And apparently by cheating against nature, it doesn't provide 60 FPS in 4K by offering dual cards in SLI or any dual PCB format, but brings dual GPUs on one single PCB. To cool down that infernally heated PCB in a case slightly smaller than an Xbox One, it needs the entire mini-PC to be basically drenched in liquid cooler.

Half liquid cooler, half flaming metal

There is no word on what memory will be available right now, or what motherboard will come with it, but it will likely be a mini-ITX with 32GB of memory support. In the presentation video, an ASRock Z97 ITX motherboard with a Devil’s Canyon (Core i7-4790K) processor was visible so we assume it'll probably come with those two. The upper part of the case will be dedicated to cooling the entire machine while the lower part will house the modules. Yes, it needs half of the entire physical space available just for cooling the other half. It's quite extraordinary.

Overall, when you look at it, the Quantum Project is basically the top dog of Mini-PCs and an apex predator against Steam Machines, and when it can really go through 4K 60FPS with such ease, we can't but remember how lousily one single GTX 980Ti went through the 4K 3D Mark tests. It was just one GPU and one graphics card to be honest; nevertheless, to afford words like "playable" and "4K" in one phrase right now is no easy feat, and to assume 4K resolution goes together with 60FPS is totally unheard of.

Now we can only witness how the market will react to it. The numbers and specs are there, but in the end an empty wallet will burn harder than dual GPUs spitting molten metal out of the heatsink.

AMD Quantum Project (3 Images)

AMD Quantum: Mean Machine
One half cooler, the other half modulesAll in a smaller shape than an Xbox One
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