Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The Hawaii XT based GPU is a difficult beast to tame, you want to control a beastly performing product. So to tackle two of these bulls on one PCB, that a positive challenge. AMD took a somewhat simplified way out by going for Hybrid cooling with the most important thing being liquid cooling on the two GPUs. That works out well, really well actually as the cooling performance is more than sufficient. Liquid cooling does have a deficit though, and that is ambient temperatures. So always make sure you have a really properly ventilated chassis as to tame 500 Watt of RAW unadulterated gaming performance will create a significant amount of exhausted heat. In return you get a product that is just beyond grand in performance, but yeah, AMD has been able to tame the beast, and admittedly with the the Radeon R9 295x2 is an just excellent piece of hardware that is going to offer much gaming pleasure.

Cooling & Noise Levels

We really already addressed this in the chapter above, but the cooling works well and is efficient enough to keep the product at say 70 Degrees C under full stress. Remember what I stated about ambient temperatures though as these will have an effect on overall cooling. It is pretty amazing that all that heat is drawn from the two GPUs and exhausted through a simple 120mm radiator. Now the product is not silent during gaming though, you will be able to hear it. As such I do feel that a dual fan 240mm radiator would have been a slightly better choice here. But we understand the complexity alright, as a lot of people can only mount one 120mm fan in the upper compartment of their PC chassis. Overall I am savvy. 

Aesthetics

Lovers will love, haters will hate... I can not make it any more simple then that. If you ask for my personal opinion, I think the card looks just great with the metal housing, the back-plate, the overall design and the LED lit fan and logo. Some people will frown upon the liquid cooler... but here again lovers will love, haters will hate. The PCB is massively customized to house the 2 GPUs and I can only spot quality components ensuring a longer lifespan of this product, lovely. The black/metal design, the subtle fan combined with a hint of red is just fantastic. The card is also very sturdy thanks to that a metal plate at the top of the card so the card cannot bend when seated horizontally in the PC, also present is a full cover back-plate. 

Power Consumption

Believe it or not, but power consumption is OK, even at 500 Watts. See all the R9-290X cards we have tested utilized roughly a 275 Watt TDP. That makes this Dual GPU solution a good 50 Watts cheaper in power consumption. Now sure, I can't deny that it's quite a bit for just playing games (or mining coins) but the reality is that I honestly expected worse. On power consumption versus power supply, I already have been hinting two/three times in this article that each 8-pin power connector must be connected to a separate 12V rails (unless you have one big 12V rails). Preferably these 12V rails have say 28 Amps available each, okay? You start with a 850 Watt PSU BTW as you will want some reserves for system and GPU overclocking. Hey, it is the nature of high-end gaming. I think enthusiast consumers at this performance level will not mind that much about the power draw and be forgiving. That TDP also will make running multi-GPU solutions a bit more complicated. With two cards (4 GPUs) we think an 1250+ Watt PSU would be sufficient. 

Game Performance

One word - Breathtaking, period. Really I should stop right here. I was impressed by the overall gaming performance as there simply is not one game that can not deal with this card. And that is at the very best image quality settings. And you do it all with a nice 30" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600. I mean BioShock infinite at Ultra quality levels are still oozing performance. For those with Ultra High Definition gaming in mind, the 295x2 is the first real card I could recommend, it will simply make a lot of sense. Yeah, it would be a sweet spot and you'd have 4 GB of graphics memory per GPU. The FCAT results show that AMD has delivered and offers as promised, the overall frametimes look really good with a small anomaly here and there. Nvidia still is leading a tiny hint, but they have hardware based frame pacing, whereas AMD (we think) makes use of a software implementation. Single card or not, do realize that the card does run in Crossfire mode, if the driver does not support the game then it'll kick back to one GPU. This is similar to NVIDIA's implementation though. I also want to mention that AMD these days offers a hot-fix driver with nearly every AAA game release. 

Overclocking

Overclocking then. The card already is a beast performance wise with its two fully enabled GPUS, overclocking Hawaii XT GPUs really won't push significant amounts of additional performance, so quite franky, we advise you to leave things as they are. Regardless, we did overclock a bit to see where the limit is to be found. The reference GPU core clocks are 1018 MHz. There is room for more tweaking but the product is a bit hard to be overlcocked. You'll achieve roughly 1100 MHz on both GPUs, after which the card will get unstable or start to downclock. Memory wise you'll likely end in the 5600 to 5800 MHz range (effective data-rate). Overall that brings the card another 5 maybe 10% performance when compared to reference clock frequencies.

Concluding

AMD brought a really nice product to the table. We quite frankly did not expect to see a this Dual-GPU monster to have full Hawaii XT GPUs, and that's over 12 Billion transistors, 5632 Shader processors and a good 11.5 TFLOPS of compute performance smacked onto a single PCB. AMD truly released the fastest graphics card in the world. Crossfire has been a bit of a tricky thing for AMD users the past two years, admittedly AMD did improve by supporting games at launch with driver hotfixes. Also and we have to state this, in FCAT frame pacing really works out well for AMD. It is not yet perfect, but I'd rate it good to excellent. Kudo's to AMDs driver team for nailing that. This means no more micro stuttering. The 295x2 is lovely in its design and looks. The cooling is impressive as you can expect 70 C temps as maximum on both the GPUs under heavy load. We can't stress enough though that liquid cooling and coolant are very susceptible to ambient temperatures. Make sure that your chassis has proper ventilation. Noise then, the card is a bit audible under heavy gaming load. You will hear it, no doubt -- but it remains acceptable and is not at a level that it's annoying or anything. With frametime latency under control we get near fluid like game-play in return whilst you enable the most intensive image quality settings. And isn't that what it is all about with PC gaming?

The suggested etailer price for the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 is 1099 EURO + VAT ( $1499USD). The product will become available on the week of April 21st on our etail partner sites. Whether or not the price is fair in your eyes will obviously be your choice. Also we expect AMD to throw in some sort of game bundle, of course. We think AMD has put together an excellent extremely high performing product and manages to keep noise and heat levels under control. In return you get to play your games at butter-smooth framerates with merely the very best image quality settings. Pricing discussion aside, we have to give the Radeon R9 295x2 our Top pick award.

We are impressed, very much so... - Guru3D.com

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