AMD has boldly gone where it hasn't gone before for its reference designs, adding water-cooling to its newest offering, the 295X2. Just looking at the elegant design of the setup requires a rethink about the usual complexity of water-cooling. It's a card, a fan and two thick cables. That's it. Inside, you have two Asetek 740GN watercooling blocks chained in series with the coolant going through a 120mm radiator before the 120mm air fan takes over the heat-removal effort.
The fan is a rather large one, with dimensions of 153mm x 120mm x 63mm. The card itself isn't small either. While 65mms wide is actually quite reasonable, at 307mm long and 111mm high, it will only just fit into a fairly standard mid-tower. Once you add that to the fan and cables, a roomy case becomes a must-have.
The card retails for around $1,800, and AMD is aiming directly at the hard-core gamer market. Here, though, you only need one card rather than two in Crossfire since the 2952X itself is essentially a Crossfire card all in one sleek metal shroud. This single-slot advantage is the 295's main drawcard over running two separate 295X cards in Crossfire.
It has two fully enabled Hawaii chips on board, which are clocked even higher than the single Hawaii chip on the 290X, AMD's single GPU offering. The memory is similarly high-end with 4GB of 5GHz GDDR5, operating on a 512-bit memory bus on each GPU giving a whopping 1,024 GDDR5 memory bus lines on a single board. The upshot of this is that each GPU gets a generous 320GB/sec of graphical output.
The downside to this is the power draw, which is massive. A 750W PSU will be a minimum in order to handle the load, and one with two 8pin PCI-Express power connectors, each able to push 28 Amps on a 12V rail is recommended. AMD have said that the Typical Power Board (TPB) rating for this card is 500W, which is the first time AMD has put out a card with a power rating that high.
Once you start looking at the power draw, you realise that getting rid of 500W worth of power in the form of heat means that a standard card fan (or two or three) just isn't going to make the grade. This is where the water-cooling system comes into its own and being a both an air and liquid system you are getting the absolute best of both worlds, handling the heat without a problem and relatively quietly.
Unlike previous AMD cards, which often were quite noisy, the addition of water-cooling has made this card so quiet that it's only the cherry red glow of the neon in the 'perfect for a case-window' fan that reassures the card is doing its graphical thing. AMD has obviously worked very hard on keeping the noise down and here it has achieved impressive results. While testing without a case, the noise was minimal, so with a case around it the noisy graphics fans of old are gone without a trace.
In that testing, the card took everything thrown at it in its stride without breaking a sweat. Running 3DMark FireStrike Extreme gave a whopping score of 8139. The Crysis 3 tests in Very High detail showed an extremely impressive average frame rate of 78.91, topping out at over 101 FPS. The standalone Crysis GPU Very High detail test was almost unbelievable at an average of 94.87 FPS. Even running the test at 4K (2160p) resolution gave a mind-boggling result of 60 FPS.
Compared to running two separate 290X cards in Crossfire, the 295X2 saves a slot and has far superior heat dissipation. However, it's not the most economical solution. A pair of 290X cards currently cost around $1500. The downside of the extra power required for those cards, the extra heat generation in your case and the loss of at least most (if not all) of your other motherboard slots is absolutely worth taking into account, making the 295X2 a less extravagant solution than it first appears.
CHECK PRICE
SPECS
11.5 TFLOPS
5632 stream processors
8GB memory
512-bit memory interface x 2
Dual liquid-cooled AMD Radeon™ GPUs
Asetek closed-loop liquid cooling
