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Today we are checking out AMD’s latest dual-GPU graphics card, codenamed ‘Project Hydra’ it does the seemingly impossible by sticking two Hawaii XT GPUs on a single PCB. Although we thought it not possible AMD is ready to prove us wrong as they unleash the Radeon R9 295X2...
Roughly this time last month we first caught wind of an upcoming dual-GPU Hawaii graphics card when AMD teased media with their ‘Top Secret – Two is Better Than One’ campaign. Although virtually nothing was given away, it was clear the successor to the Radeon HD 7990 was soon to be released. For those of you who don’t know, the Radeon HD 7990 was essentially two Tahiti dies on a single board, in other words a pair of slightly under clocked Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition GPUs. Back when we tested the 7990 in April of 2013 we found it a formidable rival for the GeForce GTX Titan and it certainly stirred up the $1000 GPU war. The biggest problem the 7990 faced was AMD’s frame latency performance, which at the time was quite poor, especially when compared to a single GPU solution such as the Titan.
 The 7990 also suffered from enormous power consumption figures when compared to the Titan, as we found it consumed almost 40% more power. Still putting a pair of 28nm GPUs that each consist of 4.3 billion transistors onto a single PCB measuring just 30cm (12 in) long was an impressive feat of engineering. In fact this is what made the Radeon R9 290X which was to follow, even more impressive. Built using the same 28nm process it squeezed in 6.2 billion transistors, blowing the die size up to 438mm2 from 352mm2. This expansion allowed for 38% more SPUs when compared to the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, but according to our findings it also meant that the 290X consumed up to 20% more power, giving it a TDP rating of roughly 300 watts! The enormous power consumption figure resulted in a huge thermal output from the GPU, so much so that R9 290X’s were often found throttling down just to maintain stability. This then had us questioning AMDs ‘Top Secret – Two is Better Than One’ campaign, could they really be contemplating putting a pair of Hawaii XT GPU’s on a single PCB?
 Apparently so, as today marks the arrival of the Radeon R9 295X2, the most extreme graphics cards we have ever seen. Boasting an incredible 12.4 billion transistors, 5632 stream processors and 11.5 TFLOPS of compute power, it is difficult to put those numbers into perspective. Yet the mind blowing specifications keep coming, there is a total of 8GB’s of GDDR5 memory that works through a dual 512-bit memory bus, providing a total memory bandwidth of 640GB/s. When developing such a graphics card AMD faced two main challenges which were keeping it cool and feeding it enough power, though the second is probably more of a challenge for your power supply. AMD says that this graphics card is “Not for the faint of heart” and that users should “Handle with extreme caution”, let’s find out why... |
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djmix |
Posted on: 04/08/2014 12:23 PM
WOWzers thats insane. I will take 2 please  |
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powerbug |
Posted on: 04/08/2014 08:42 PM
There is far too much power going through those 8-pin PCIe connectors. |