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thanks to our generous monthly contributors we have a fun money budget
to do videos about stuff that we don't get a sample of sometimes so we spent
about a hundred of it paying two-way shipping for this monstrosity
so we could borrow austin's AMD r9 295
x2 dual GPU behemoth of a graphics card for some benchmarking button we'll kick
things off with specs and i actually think the most interesting thing about
them is how uninteresting they are normally when we get a dual GPU graphics
card we get to analyze how many cuda cores or stream processors were cut and
hypothesize about how the manufacturer decided what reduced clock speed to run
at to stay within power and thermal limits not here this card is just a big
pile of aluminum shrouded fully back plated sexiness with two flat out r9
290x hawaii core gpus on it each with
all 2816 stream processors all four gigs
of glorious video memory connected via a non-nerfed 512-bit memory bus and the
best part is both of them are actually rated at slightly higher boost clocks
compared to an r9 290 x which due to its unique cooling solution it even manages
to sustain consistently unlike a standalone r9290x wow we've also got the
usual AMD technologies including zero core which turns off the second GPU at
idle to save power directx 11 and future directx 12 support AMD mantel support
true audio ifinity with support for up to five direct attached displays and
more with mst hubs bridgeless crossfire with up to two of these monstrosities
capable of running a four GPU setup and excellent opencl compute performance but
that's all normal stuff what about the challenges that had to be overcome to
build this bad boy aside from designing its complicated pcb and beef-tastic
power delivery circuitry which you'll find under a dedicated copper heatsink
under its own dedicated red led fan AMD
had to find a way to cool a card that they have rated at a massive 500 watt
TDP i mean that is well beyond any previous reference graphics card the
most we've seen before is 375 watts and it meant we were either going to end
up with a leaf blower attached to the card or a pretty exotic cooling solution
fortunately AMD went with the exotic cooling solution route and that's what
you see here this card has an all-in-one liquid cooler from asatech included out
of the box it's not the world's most exceptional aio with a single 38
millimeter thick 120 millimeter radiator and dual block slash pump combo unit
design and in fact it's not even the first time a dual AMD GPU card has been
handled this way i'm looking at you ares too but the remarkable thing about it is
that this is the first reference card from AMD or NVIDIA that uses a solution
like this so what are the pros and cons of this unique and expensive card aside
from the price advantage number one with water we can carry heat away from the
gpus much more quickly than we can with air to a large heat exchanger in this
case a radiator with lots of surface area that we can cool with large
relatively quiet fans and in practice it works the r9 295 x2 runs at about 70
degrees under load well under the 95 degrees of a 290x advantage number two
because this radiator can be located some distance away
the heat can be exhausted directly from the case and the card can remain a
reasonable size so it will actually fit in a fairly standard albeit longer than
usual at 305 millimeters two slot form factor so more space and cooler
operation for your other components sounds dandy right well hold on drawback
number one to power this sucker you need
two pci express eight pin power connectors and not just any old ones you
can't use daisy chained plugs that lead to a single connector on your power
supply and you'll even need to check which power supply connectors are wired
up to which 12 volt rails on a multi-rail power supply in your psu's
manual ensure you've got at least 28 amps on each of them to correctly power
the card or you could be looking at a fire situation
drawback number two is the form factor it'll fit in your pci express slots for
sure but you'll need extra clearance between the card and the side panel for
the tubing to come out extra clearance behind the card for its over 12 inch
length and you'll need a nearby 120 millimeter fan mount with 65 millimeters
of clearance for your liquid cooling radiator and fan fortunately AMD
includes long enough tubing that you should be able to rear or top mount it
in most cases drawback number three is
heat and power consumption yes the heat is managed but it's still being kicked
out into your room which might be a boon in the winter but isn't so much fun in
the summer and even compared to a gtx 780 ti sli setup this card consumes
between 100 to 200 watts more power in games which if you're in california and
you game for about three hours a day will amount to about an extra five to seven dollars on your monthly power bill
and then of course the last drawback is price but if you didn't know this card was gonna be expensive then stop
dreaming so now after all that the last thing you're probably waiting for is
performance but before i hand off to luke i would like to take a moment to
genuinely thank AMD for making this card
people complaining about all those crazy requirements i outlined before and how
much of a crazy frankenstein science
fair experiment of a solution this card is compared to most products that
actually get a consumer release need to go away and go buy something that was
made for them what AMD has delivered here compared to their competitors like
Intel and NVIDIA is the first product that i've seen in years that i can say
is truly enthusiast grade but what does enthusiast grade mean to me to me it
doesn't mean fast or elegant necessarily
i mean it's great if it can be fast and elegant but what to me it means is
pushing the boundaries of what's possible with modern engineering and
manufacturing and if that results in a little bit of hassle during the setup
process and a little bit of heaven forbid actual research and
planning before you can use it then so be it i've been calling for Intel to do
away with their 130 watt TDP limit and give us a proper enthusiast great
extreme edition for ages something that requires water cooling with a top grade
motherboard to work properly but that legitimately stomps on the consumer
grade offerings available and they just don't do it as it is an extreme edition
costs hundreds of dollars more than a k and delivers a couple percent better
performance it's fast yeah but it's not actually tailored to the enthusiast
NVIDIA does slightly better in this regard they do enable partners like evga
to build crazy stuff like the twin series and kingpin series cards but AMD
has upped the ante by creating a reference product that really pushes the
boundaries and i applaud them for it over to you luke
all right guys so today we're testing an AMD 295x2
versus dual 780 ti's from NVIDIA for the AMD card i've done my overclocking
settings in AMD overdrive i've overclocked the core by about eight
percent and i've overclocked the memory by 135 remember that's times by four
when calculating the overall memory bandwidth for the NVIDIA cards i've only changed
their core speed and i've increased it by 250 this is because of auto balancing
power rails so i don't really mess with the memory too much if you guys want to see all the rest of my overclocking
settings be sure to check the overclocking dock linked below in all of
these graphics cards comparison videos and let's move on to see how those
results end up in bioshock infinite and thief these cards trade back and forth
and it's not by huge amounts so it's not too surprising and then in assassin's
creed 4 we see that there was a bottleneck somewhere else in the computer i wanted to show this result
because it shows that they perform very well on their own but then it's not that
great in comparison because again there's something else on the computer
slowing these cards down if you guys want to learn more about bottlenecks be
sure to check out Linus's Techquickie episode um fast as possible talking
about bottlenecks and all that kind of stuff you can learn about bottlenecks there
in terms of general observations uh i'm fairly happy with this card when i first
heard it announced i expected it to be one loud and too
really really hot but it's neither in AMD overdrive it caps its temperature at
75 degrees and its audible level is pretty consistent through the whole time
of using it due to that external radiator so i'm quite happy about those
things all right guys thanks for watching please don't forget to like and
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