AMD officially announces R9 295X2 with two Hawaii GPUs

AMD has officially released the Radeon R9 295X2. The card combines two 290X GPUs on the same PCB. The GPUs are clocked slightly higher than the standard 290X and are kept at the right temperature with the help of an impressive water cooler.

AMD has mounted two full Hawaii GPUs with 2816 stream processors on the PCB of the 295X2. The GPUs work in CrossFireX and use AMD’s xdma technology, with communication between the GPUs over the PCI Express bus. To this end, AMD has mounted a plx chip on the pcb of the video card.

It is striking that both 290X GPUs are clocked slightly higher than the 290X; namely at 1018MHz instead of 1000MHz. As usual with AMD cards, the GPU continues to maintain this speed as long as it falls within the set temperature and consumption budget.

Compared to an R9 290X, the two GPUs on the 295X2 are unchanged. Each GPU has 4GB of memory that is addressed via a 512-bit wide memory bus. The memory is still clocked at a gddr5 speed of 5GHz.

Because the 295X2 gets a TDP of 500 watts, AMD recommends a power supply that can deliver at least fifty amps on the two eight-pin power connections. To dissipate that heat, AMD has collaborated with Asetek to provide the card with water cooling. Both GPUs are equipped with a heatsink with an integrated pump that pumps the heated water in the direction of a radiator, which in turn is equipped with a 120mm fan. The memory and the VRMs are not water-cooled and for those components there is still a fan on the card itself. The R9 295X2 will be available from April 21 for a price of 1330 euros.