14 DAY TRIAL // As far as we know, the dual-GPU Radeon R9 295 X2 graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is scheduled to be released on April 8. That didn't stop the press deck from leaking prematurely though.
We have already seen a pair of leaked photos of the new video card in the wild, but now we've been given all the info on Vesuvius that AMD has been hoarding, courtesy of VideoCardz.
The photos confirm, once again, the use of a hybrid cooling device, which keeps heat low thanks to a combo of air cooling and a closed-loop liquid cooling system.
The contraption is pretty similar to the one employed by the ASUS Ares II Radeon HD 7990, the current AMD dual-chip board.
The slides also reveal the technical specifications, but they do not say what the price will be, which is a shame.
After all, it would be great if, once and for all, we got confirmation that AMD's product would not mirror NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan Z and demand a payment of $3,000 / €3,000.
Until we are told otherwise by the company, we will assume the price is somewhere between $1,000 / €1,000 and $1,500 / €1,500.
That said, the specifications of the adapter are along the lines of previous rumors, with two Hawaii GPUs that have all the internal parts enabled.
AMD was able to let them work in full instead of limiting the chips for the sake of the TDP (thermal design power).
So we have 5,632 stream processors, 2 x 2,816 as it were, which is a bit under the 5,760 CUDA cores of NVIDIA's Titan Z (2 x 2880).
That means there are 352 TMUs (2 x 176), 128 ROPs (2 x 64) and a memory interface of 1,024 (2 x 512).
Speaking of memory, each 512 band connects a GPU to 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, which makes 8 GB the total capacity. Quite a bit below the 12 GB of NVIDIA, and another reason to dismiss the reports that say that AMD will choose the same price. A PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express 3.0 x48 bridge chip is utilized by the card.
Finally, we know the clocks, the details coveted but never released by the company or leak/rumor sites, until now: the GPUs can reach 1018 MHz (each) and the VRAM operates at 5 GHz, leading to a total bandwidth of 640 GB/s.
Two 8-pin PCI Express connectors provide the AMD Radeon R9 295 X2 with energy through a 12-phase VRM. Finally, for connectivity, we have dual-link DVI (digital only) and four mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors.
