The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review

With two R9 290Xs running for roughly $1200 at current prices, we’ve expected for some time that a dual-GPU Hawaii card would be over $1000, so AMD isn’t too far off from our expectations. Ultimately AMD’s $1500 price tag amounts to a $300 premium for getting two 290Xs on to a single card, along with the 295X2’s much improved build quality and more complex cooling apparatus. Meanwhile GPU complexity and heat density has reached a point where the cost of putting together a dual-GPU card is going to exceed the cost of a single card, so these kinds of dual-GPU premiums are going to be here to stay. Each Hawaii chip is paired with a cool 4 GB GDDR5 graphics memory running over a 512-bit memory interface. Now you’d figure that AMD would at the very least be a little conservative when it comes to the core clock frequency of the GPUs as two of these puppies will produce quite a bit of heat and utilize a nice sum of power, but no Sir…

If I cant get the numbers up I will probably sell it and get another 1070 which can make more at a third the power draw. There is very little in the way of literature or videos covering mining on this card in particular. First, the appeal of a card like the R9 295X2 is really in 4K—at 1080p, the single GPU configurations were more than adequate for gaming. Only at 4K, when frame rates dropped below 30 frames per second (fps), did we see a huge difference between the various solutions. The R9 295X2 dipped slightly below the 30fps mark in Metro Last Light, but managed 29fps in Shogun 2 and was well above that mark in BioShock Infinite. If you want to play at these settings, then clearly, dual GPUs are the only game in town.

This shouldn’t be an issue when frame pacing is working properly, since there are no dropped or runt frames to report. To that end, all of our testing happens in the aforementioned Rosewill Throne chassis. And rather than simply firing up benchmarks after an idle period, we heat up every card with several minutes of gameplay prior to recording results. Really though, AMD effectively addressed variability on its reference Hawaii-based board through a driver, and most third-party solutions are better-cooled. Given the relatively exotic cooling requirements for the R9 295X2, it comes as no great surprise that AMD is targeting the same luxury video card crowd that the GTX Titan pioneered last year when it premiered at $1000. This means using more expensive cooling devices, a greater emphasis on build quality with a focus on metal shrouding, and a few gimmicks to make the card stand out in windowed cases.

The switch interfaces with each Hawaii processor’s PCI Express 3.0 controller, facilitating a 16-lane connection between the GPUs and platform. If those cards are the dreadnoughts of our industry, then we’re about how to buy ens to enter the era of super-dreadnoughts (yes, that’s a thing). You can also mine ethereum through a cloud mining contract with Genesis Mining as well as other cloud mining contracts that can be found here.

Radeon R9 295×2 GPU

There’s a central fan that pushes a modest amount of air across both cores, but the bulk of the cooling occurs when the cooling liquid is pumped to the attached 120mm radiator block. The radiator block is designed for the fan mount at the top of almost all tower cases; AMD’s reference card comes with a single 120mm fan mounted behind the radiator and blowing air across it and out of the case. As a result, the R9 295X2 is quieter than a single AMD R9 290X in that card’s “über” fan speed mode when tested under load. Again, AMD starts with two Hawaii processors, each manufactured at 28 nm and composed of 6.2 billion transistors.

  • The R9 295X2 dipped slightly below the 30fps mark in Metro Last Light, but managed 29fps in Shogun 2 and was well above that mark in BioShock Infinite.
  • If you want to play at these settings, then clearly, dual GPUs are the only game in town.
  • Wouldn’t you be better off building that supercomputer using two, three, or even four Titans?
  • If you want more money you need a stronger more efficient card ocing them often makes them worse for profit instead of better as they start consuming a lot more power for not much more performance.

That’s more than 100 MHz lower than the GK110 on a GeForce GTX Titan. Wouldn’t you be better off building that supercomputer using two, three, or even four Titans? In any case, the fact that AMD went this route isn’t wholly surprising – there aren’t too many ways to move 500W of heat – but the lack of significant binning did catch us off guard. Dual-GPU cards are often (but not always) using highly binned how to buy pumpeth GPUs to further contain power consumption, which isn’t something AMD has done this time around, and hence the reason for the R9 295X2’s doubled power consumption. So long as AMD can remove the heat then they’ll be fine, and from our test results it’s clear that AMD has definitely done some binning, but none the less it’s interesting that we aren’t seeing as aggressive binning here as in past years.

However, methodology is also more relevant than ever, particularly in light of the dynamic clock rate behavior we described when AMD’s Radeon R9 290X first launched. To dissipate 500W of heat AMD has moved past blowers and even open air coolers, and moved on to a closed loop liquid cooler (CLLC). We’ll cover AMD’s cooling apparatus in more detail when we take a closer look at the construction of the R9 295X2, but as with AMD’s 500W target AMD is charting new territory for a reference card by making a CLLC the baseline cooler. With two Asetek pumps and a 120mm radiator to dissipate heat, the R9 295X2 is a significant departure from AMD’s past designs and an equally significant change in the traditionally conservative system requirements for a reference card. After much consumer speculation and more than a few teasers, AMD is releasing their long-awaited Hawaii-powered entry to their dual-GPU series of cards. With Hawaii AMD has a very powerful (and very power hungry) GPU at their disposal, and for its incarnation in the R9 295X2 AMD is going above and beyond anything they’ve done before, making it very clear that they’re playing to win.

You should always combine multiple sources of information and analysis before making an investment and seek independent expert financial advice.

Altogether this means we’re looking at a pair of top-tier Hawaii GPUs, each with their full 2816 SPs and 64 ROPs enabled. Otherwise compared to the retired 7990, the R9 295X2 should be a far more capable card, offering 40% more shading/texturing performance and 2x the ROP throughput of AMD’s previous flagship. I recently picked up a used R9 295×2 in great condition and I have got it in my rig for mining. I got it on a dedicated 850 psu and I am running lolMiner on nicehash. I feel like I am not generating the kind of hash rate I was anticipating.

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Still there is no profile for Kingdom Come but maybe one of the Crysis profiles will work hence it is Cryengine. I have just installed Kingdom Come Deliverance and I am only getting about fps. When I try to turn crossfire on in Radeon Software the app seems to restart and the option goes back to off. The profitability table shows the revenue from mining the most profitable coins (Bitcoin Ethereum) on AMD Radeon R9 295X2 per month.

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AMD has a respectable track record of keeping its dual-GPU boards almost as fast as two single-GPU flagships. The Radeon HD 6990 ran something like 50 MHz slower than a Radeon HD 6970. But it still managed to accommodate two fully-operational Cayman processors. The Radeon HD 7990 did battle against the GeForce GTX 690 with Tahitis also operating 50 MHz slower than the then-fastest card in AMD’s stable. Now as can be expected by any card labeled a “no compromises” card by its manufacturer, all of this performance does come at a cost.

Radeon HD 7990

Whereas a reference Radeon R9 290X runs at up to 1000 MHz, the 295X2 gets a small bump to 1018 MHz. Yes, the processors are still subject to the dynamic throttling behavior we illustrated in The Cause Of And Fix For Radeon R9 290X And 290 Inconsistency. But because cooling is better this time around, we’ve been told that throttling shouldn’t be an issue. Join us in the reference article, have a peek at the product below that is the X2 and then let’s head on-wards into the review.

A few short months later, Nvidia shot back with the GeForce GTX 680, hitting harder and for less money. Increased prices were offset by higher frame rates, which affluent gamers willingly paid. Lastly, let’s compare three generations of dual-GPU graphics cards from AMD in videos. Thanks to you I have the new drivers and crossfire profiles for other games. At the moment with the hybrid drivers I have all the options available but like I said there are no profiles to choose from and also any crossfire option I choose seems to make absolutely no difference in game.

Radeon R9 295X2 8 GB Review: Project Hydra Gets Liquid Cooling

Though Tahiti remains in AMD’s product stack, Hawaii’s greater performance and additional features heralded the retail retirement of the dual-Tahiti 7990, once again leaving an opening in AMD’s product stack. The last time we took a look at a new AMD dual-GPU video card was just under a year ago, when AMD launched the Radeon HD 7990. Based on AMD’s then-flagship Tahiti GPUs, how to draw a doge the 7990 was a solid design that offered performance competitive with a dual card (7970GHz Edition Crossfire) setup while fixing many of the earlier Radeon HD 6990’s weaknesses. Performance We tested the R9 295X2 using an Intel Core i7-4770K processor on a Gigabyte Z87X-D3H motherboard with 16GB of DDR memory and Windows 8.1, with all patches and updates installed.

Right now each gpu is doing about 10Mhash and together they make me about $3 a day. I was hoping I could get closer to twice that but I cant seem to get much out of it by overclocking. I have the memory at 1400Mhz stable and pushing it to 1600 causes one of the gpus to give up.

All that earns the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 our Editors’ Choice for high-end, multi-core graphics cards. As for the GTX Titan Z, NVIDIA’s forthcoming dual-GPU card is scheduled to launch later this month, and while it should be a performance powerhouse it’s also going to retail at $3000, twice the price of the R9 295X2. So although the GTX Titan Z can be used for gaming, we’re expecting it to be leveraged more for its compute performance than its gaming performance. In any case based on NVIDIA’s theoretical performance figures we have a strong suspicion that the GTX Titan Z is underclocked for TDP reasons, so it remains to be seen whether it’s even gaming performance competitive with the R9 295X2. The price for that level of performance and quality on a single card will be $1499 (€1099 + VAT), $500 higher than the 7990’s $999 launch price, and similarly $500 higher than NVIDIA’s closest competitor, the GTX Titan Black.