AMD pulls out heavyweights via its manufacturing partners

Sep 5, 2015 12:57 GMT  ·  By
PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390 - the most powerful card in the world
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   PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390 - the most powerful card in the world

Although not technically so, since professional graphics cards can already hold 16GB GDDR5 integrated memory, this is the first consumer-class graphics card with 16GB of onboard memory, more even than Titan X’ 12GB.

Built by PowerColor, the new adapter carries not one, but two AMD Radeon R9 390 “Hawaii” GPUs and basically brings professional graphics cards performance and memory availability to the consumer market, effectively becoming the highest-performing graphics card on the market. To make things even spicier than they are already, PowerColor gives customers a free Razer mouse bundled with the card.

Looking like a truck having parked in your PC case, the new world champion features two AMD Radeon R9 390 “Hawaii” graphics processing units with 2560 stream processors, 164 texture units, 64 raster operations pipelines as well as 512-bit memory bus. The dual GPUs are clocked at 1000MHz and each chip comes equipped with 8GB of onboard GDDR5 memory operating at 5400MHz.

AMD wants victory through raw power

The new PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390 monster works on a custom printed-circuit board with a 15-phase voltage regulator module and is powered by an IRPRIC or International Rectifier PowerIRstage IC (integrated circuit) that features sold-state ferrite-core chokes together with solid-state capacitors. Eating electricity like a fat kid eats candy, the Dual-Core R9 390 uses a PLX PCI Express bridge and 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.

Cooling down this nuclear fun generator, the new Devil 13 graphics card is equipped with a triple-slot cooling system and the already ominous heat-pipes that are coupled with a large aluminum radiator and three high-end fans. To emphasize the fact that if provoked it may end up eating your kids, PowerColor placed LED backlighting on the card that glows a bright red color, pulsating slowly on the Devil 13 logo.

Far more powerful than any consumer card at the moment

PowerColor claims that the graphics card has a peak compute performance of 10.24TFLOPS, which leaves behind any single chip graphics adapters today. Unfortunately, there’s an issue. The dual chip R9 390 relies on AMD CrossFire multi-GPU technology which is not supported by all games on the market. This means that some games might benefit from the raw power of dual chips, while others will treat the card as a single AMD Radeon R9 390 graphics board.

However, the novelty stops here. Since the “Hawaii” GPU isn’t something completely new and while it is based on the older GCN 1.1 architecture, it will support features like DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.1, Vulkan and Mantle application programming interfaces.

There is clearly a new champion in town already, but we wonder for how long the Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390 will hold its supremacy, when the immensely powerful Radeon R9 Fury X2 is bound to arrive, which will bring not two 2013 “Hawaii” GPUs, but two 2015 “Fijis.”

The price for the PowerColor Devil 13 Dual Core R9 390 is €699 ($779) and will be available worldwide starting September 17.

PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390
PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390

PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390 (3 Images)

PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390 - the most powerful card in the world
PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390PowerColor Devil 13 Dual-Core R9 390
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