14 DAY TRIAL // Announced in early September, the arrival of the new PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 was and still is seen as the most powerful GPU tandem in the world. Arriving with two “Hawaii” GPUs, it brings double the Radeon R9 390 power, with 16GB onboard memory and 2560 stream processors.
Although much more powerful graphics cards are on the horizon, with the un-named dual GPU NVIDIA project and AMD's own upcoming dual "Fiji" R9 Gemini making some headlines, PowerColor is still, and probably will be today's most powerful graphics card.
Built by PowerColor, the new adapter carries not one, but two AMD Radeon R9 390 “Hawaii” GPUs, and offers a staggering, professional graphics card-size memory of 16GB GDDR5, 2560 stream processors, 164 texture units, 64 raster operations pipelines as well as 512-bit memory bus. Each of the two tandem GPUs are clocked at 1000MHz and each chip comes equipped with 8GB of onboard GDDR5 memory operating at 5400MHz.
The circuit board is custom printed and has a 15-phase voltage regulator module and is powered by an IRPRIC or International Rectifier PowerIRstage IC (integrated circuit), featuring solid-state ferrite-core chokes together with solid-state capacitors. The Dual-Core R9 390 is not an eco-friendly card in any way, shape or form.
Using a PLX PCI Express bridge, it features four 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which can deliver a total of 600W of power to the board, besides the 75W already being supplied by the PCIe x16 slot.
Before the R9 Gemini and future NVIDIA project arrive, you can rely on the Devil 13
All this raw power output equals no less than 10.24TFLOPS compute performance, which leaves behind all graphic adapters today. Unfortunately, the card works with AMD CrossFire multi-GPU technology that has lots of problems with current games which do not support AMD's CrossFire technology, and some will treat the card as sporting one single GPU instead of two.
Nevertheless, big titles will work well with AMD tech, so as long you play the latest and biggest AAA titles, you should have no problems.
You can buy the immensely powerful PowerColor Devil 13 Dual Core R9 390 and not feel bad even when the R9 Gemini/Fury X2 comes, since the performance of this card will be so high that current games won't make any difference.
Prices of the new card can be found online for $799 (€705), which is just bit more than we expected.
