Radeon R9 295X2 Pictured in the Flesh, Specs Leaked

Here it is, folks! The first pictures of what you get inside the steel briefcase AMD ships the Radeon R9 295X2 in. AMD got over the stonewall of having to cool two 250W GPUs with a single two-slot cooling solution, by making it an air+liquid hybrid. The cooler appears to have been designed by any of the major water-cooling OEMs (such as Asetek, Akasa, etc.), and most likely consists of a pair of pump-blocks plumbed to a single 120 x 120 mm radiator, over a single coolant loop. The coolant channel, we imagine, could be identical to that of the ROG ARES 2 by ASUS. There's also a 90 mm fan, but that probably cools heatsinks covering the memory, VRM, and PCIe bridge. The card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which as you'll soon find out, are running at off-specs.



The Radeon R9 295X2, codenamed "Vesuvius," runs a pair of 28 nm "Hawaii" chips, routed to a PLX PEX8747 PCIe bridge. Each of the two have all 2,816 stream processors enabled, totaling the count to 5,632. The two also have 352 TMUs, and 128 ROPs between them. The entire 512-bit memory bus width is enabled, and each GPU is wired to 4 GB of memory totaling 8 GB on the card. Clock speeds remain a mystery, and probably hold the key to a lot of things, such as power draw and cooling. Lastly, there's the price. AMD could price the R9 295X2 at US $1,499, half that of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX TITAN-Z. In that price difference, heck, even for $500, you could probably buy yourself a full-coverage water block, and a full-fledged loop, complete with a meaty 3 x 120 mm radiator.

http://ift.tt/PdmhsZ