PowerColor Devil 13 Dual GPU R9 290X Review - Meet the Devil

Here Comes The BOOM!

Dark and demonic, admittedly TUL/PowerColor has a pair of fairly dark colored b.... ehm you know what. So join us for a rather evil review of the fastest graphics card on the planet. It's hotter than hell, demonic and hinted as a disciple of the Devil himself, yes, as we review the PowerColor Radeon R9 295x2 Devil 13 edition, with 8 GB graphics memory. Actually 'officially' it should be called PowerColor's Devil 13 Dual Core R9 290X. Well...

The Radeon R9-295 x2 / dual-core R9 290X is a dual-GPU based graphics card that comes with two Hawaii XT GPUs, these two GPUs are fully enabled on all Shader Processors and run up-to a cool 1018 MHz each. So that's over 12 Billion transistors, 5632 Shader Processors and a good 11.5 TFLOPs of compute performance slapped onto a single PCB. Yes, AMD has just released the fastest graphics card in the world! The graphics card is the single most fastest graphics card we have ever had in our lab, it's crazy fast as it is powered by not one, but two Hawaii XT graphics processors, say Aloha to that my man!

Each Hawaii GPU has 2816 Shader Processors on-board, and yeah, this doubly whammy and very tasty product offers everything in twofold. That means two times 6 Billion transistors, two 512-bit Memory buses with 2x4 GB - 5.0 Gbps GDDR5 memory, and combined that totals up to a cool 11.5 TFLOPs of compute performance -- coughs -- yes indeed I said it -- 11.5 TFLOPs of compute performance. But do some quick math and you realize you get a product offering a whopping 5632 Stream Processors, 352 TMUs and 128 ROPs. That means the era of Ultra HD gaming now really has begun as we have a card that is very capable at dishing out nice 50+ FPS framerates in Ultra HD whilst you can enable all the eye-candy in image quality settings you want. This will be a focus in our review as well. Will we be able to play the hottest games at that whopping 8.2 Mpixels at a 3840x2160 resolution @ 60 Hz? Each Hawaii chip is paired with a cool 4 GB of GDDR5 graphics memory running over a 512-bit memory interface. That means the card in total has 8 GB of graphics memory.

Now you'd figure that Powercolor 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... each GPU runs at (up-to) 1018 MHz.

The card is 100% custom designed including the PCB with 10+3+2 power phases, is three slot based and the most remarkable thing has to be the fact that this is air-cooled. Well, that is until you see the four 8-pin power headers of course LOL. Power Color tried to offer something really special and they will even include a Razer Ouroboros Gaming Mouse with the package. 

Anyway, I hope you are as excited about this review as we are. Join us in this demonic article, have a peek at the product below that is based on the Radeon R9 295x2 and then let's head onwards into the review.