14 DAY TRIAL // Until now, when it came to information about the upcoming dual-GPU graphics card from advanced micro devices, we could only rely on guesswork, for the most part. This has now changed.
Another thing that has changed is the total lack of pictures of the board, whose name is Radeon R9 295 X2. Someone at ChipHell was able to score a pair.
The photos confirm the rumors of a hybrid cooling system, though they dispel half of the assumptions we've made.
While the rumor mill did say that the cooler would probably be along the lines of the one used in ASUS Ares II, we also felt that AMD might only provide the air cooling part.
Which is to say, the Sunnyvale, California-based company could have decided to use a hybrid cooler, but not an all-in-one, closed-loop model, whose water block you would have to connect to an existing PC water cooling system.
It's finally been made clear that this is not the case. The AMD Radeon R9 295 X2 dual-Hawaii XT adapter really does use a closed-loop hybrid cooler.
You can see in the pictures that there is one fan on the board itself (90 mm), and another on the 120 x 120 mm radiator connected to the card cooler through two hoses.
The cooler directly cools GPU (the water block), VRM, memory and PCI Express bridge (the heatsink for these three).
Now for the specifications, which made it out at the same time as the photos did. First off, the two Hawaii XT GPUs have all 2,816 stream processors enabled. That brings the full core count to 5,632.
Also, it means that there are 352 TMUs (texture mapping units), 128 ROPs (raster operating units) and 1,024 memory bandwidth (512 per chip, each controlling 4 GB GDDR5 VRAM, for a total of 8 GB). The clocks of the card still haven't been disclosed though.
All in all, the leak doesn't seem to be a hoax, even though it came out on April 1. We'd actually prefer it to be real, because otherwise we would have to believe that AMD has really decided to price the Radeon R9 295 X2 "Vesuvius" graphics card at $3,000 / €3,000 (like on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan Z), and that would be unfortunate, to say the least. Especially since there is no humongous memory capacity to justify such a price. Right now, we're leaning towards a tag of $1,500 / €1,500.
