AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Video Card Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Video Card Review - The new AMD Radeon R9 295X2 contains two Radeon R9 290X GPUs on a single video card package that utilizes liquid cooling for the best GPU performance. We compare it to NVIDIA's competitive configuration and see just how well it performs at both huge 4K resolutions and in an Eyefinity setup.
 
Looks like NVIDIA will finally have to have some sanity in their high-end pricing as the TITAN Z now makes zero sense financially (unless resellers start gouging on this card the way they did the other 29X cards).
 
Wow, I may for the first time ever since my Voodoo 1 go Red Team..:eek:
 
har har har

I love the card, cant afford it, but love it
 
Would've liked to seen BF4 - D3D vs D3D alongside the D3D (Nvidia) vs Mantle (AMD). I'm not sure I agree with AMD cards being reviewed with Mantle while Nvidia uses D3D. Maybe I am wrong here, but I get the feeling if Mantle was Nvidia tech, people would be screaming Nvidia created a new "API" for cheating in benchmarks.
 
But makes you wonder, why would you buy this over two separate 290x cards? Points brought up in the review are not that big of a deal. If someone is purchasing such high end cards 290+, they WILL have a proper motherboard layout to fit two individual cards, and they will have the proper power supply plugs, and they DO have a choice of getting the cards with 3rd party coolers. 3rd party coolers do just fine in terms of cooling, even if a few degrees higher.
 
Meh, you save the effort of buying and installing your own watercooling.
The price difference ends up being about $200 vs 290x Crossfire.
 
Nice!

I did NOT expect this card to beat a 780ti SLI combo, but it did just that. Even with the increased clocks nvidia modified in the latest driver to help them stay somewhat competitive, when they didn't run out of Vram altogether.

Still wondering what the big deal was to not just add another 8pin, harder to calculate 3x 8pin on multi-rail PSU maybe? Still, not all that complicated.

Good review, would have maybe liked more temperature readings to see possible hotspots on the card.
 
PinchedNerve said:
Would've liked to seen BF4 - D3D vs D3D alongside the D3D (Nvidia) vs Mantle (AMD). I'm not sure I agree with AMD cards being reviewed with Mantle while Nvidia uses D3D. Maybe I am wrong here, but I get the feeling if Mantle was Nvidia tech, people would be screaming Nvidia created a new "API" for cheating in benchmarks.
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[H] has always done their benchmarks with PhysX enabled when possible.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
Meh, you save the effort of buying and installing your own watercooling.
The price difference ends up being about $200 vs 290x Crossfire.
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Are you saying thats a good thing you dont have to install WC or youre saying its a lazy way out to purchase this card vs. 2x 290x cards?
 
NickJames said:
[H] has always done their benchmarks with PhysX enabled when possible.
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Ok, its a fair point that AMD can't run PhysX. But PhysX doesn't help frame rates, it generally decreases them. Mantle is specifically for increased frame rates and Nvidia doesn't have access to Mantle that I know of so they can't write drivers that allow them to take advantage of it. Not exactly apples to apples.

Edit: If you go to Guru 3D's review, on the 3840x2160 they list both D3D and Mantle which is very interesting because Manlte looks pretty bad here and it gets repeated for Thief. 2560x1440 is different for BF4 and Mantle still looks bad in Thief at 2560x1440.

The only issue with Guru 3D's review that I have is that I haven't found out which Nvidia driver they used in the review because they linked to both 335.23 and 337.50 in the test setup page. I asked about this and haven't got a reply just yet.
 
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Thanks again Kyle and the crew. Great review as always! Glad to see that AMD is paying attention to what enthusiasts are doing and watercooling their cards for maximum performance. With all of your watercooling related articles released lately, it's time to show us a breakdown of a budget loop. I'd like to see a video attached with it like in the old Vimeo days. :)
 
Holy hell. That's one beautiful piece of hardware. Quiet, cool, fast. Sucks power like crazy, but that's not a shocker.
Great review, and a the end of the day, Team Red really deserves the crown this time around.
 
damn, nice card for sure, 600W is a lot of electrons for a single card! I figured they would used lower clocked GPUs or 290s but they went all out.

as for the dual card vs this in price.
To watercool 2 290s, you need $240 in waterblocks, $60 in rads, $50 for pump, and another $50 in misc parts (at the very least) but it would be better in terms of temps. But for the convenience and self contained setup, the 295x price is worth it vs watercooled 290s.

However I'm not sure mining would work out well on that card.
 
Sky15 said:
Is there a list of mITX cases that could fit this thing?
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You have to account for mounting that car radiator. I'm not sure where you would put it in a smaller case.

Probably someone with a similar after market setup could help though.
 
PRIME1 said:
You have to account for mounting that car radiator. I'm not sure where you would put it in a smaller case.

Probably someone with a similar after market setup could help though.
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With a little modding, the Corsair 250 D might fit it. It takes cards up to 11.8", but I'm not sure what that includes in terms of any leeway. The case has a front facade covering the front fan attachment. I am willing to bet, you could both make a cutout for the extra length if necessary AND mount the radiator in the front of the case.

Nothing a little dremel won't solve.
 
PRIME1 said:
You have to account for mounting that car radiator. I'm not sure where you would put it in a smaller case.

Probably someone with a similar after market setup could help though.
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car radiator? it's a 120mm rad, you know, like the ones that come with Corsairs H60, and about 10 other brands of self contained liquid cooling solutions?
 
I cannot afford, great success.

Bring back the asia carrera autograph contests so I can win one of these cards.
 
Is there anyone here who believes this card will be available at anything less than $2000? :rolleyes:
 
What about VRM noise? Over at TechP'up they have a video posted, and the VRM noise is louder then the fans....ALOT louder.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
damn, nice card for sure, 600W is a lot of electrons for a single card! I figured they would used lower clocked GPUs or 290s but they went all out.

as for the dual card vs this in price.
To watercool 2 290s, you need $240 in waterblocks, $60 in rads, $50 for pump, and another $50 in misc parts (at the very least) but it would be better in terms of temps. But for the convenience and self contained setup, the 295x price is worth it vs watercooled 290s.

However I'm not sure mining would work out well on that card.
Click to expand...

It should be against the law to waste these cards on mining. Just my 2 cents...
 
PinchedNerve said:
Ok, its a fair point that AMD can't run PhysX. But PhysX doesn't help frame rates, it generally decreases them. Mantle is specifically for increased frame rates and Nvidia doesn't have access to Mantle that I know of so they can't write drivers that allow them to take advantage of it. Not exactly apples to apples.
Click to expand...

It's been common knowledge since the start that AMD's efforts with Mantle were made to offset artificial slowdowns incurred by D3d, since D3d is less optimized for anyone's specific hardware. The best-case scenario for Mantle, however, is in offsetting the frame-rate performance differences incurred because of slower cpus. At 4k resolutions everything--everything--is completely gpu bound, which is not conducive to really show off what Mantle can do. Mantle is simply something you get with an AMD gpu that you don't get with a nVidia gpu, as PhysX is the reverse of that. It's no more "cheating" to use Mantle than it is to blame AMD for slapping more ram on their cards, etc.

Cheating is something else altogether: like when you set the card to do 4x FSAA but it does 3x, or 2x. Etc.

Some might even call nVidia's drivers suddenly tuned to raise performance ceilings above normal to be cheating. It probably is, in a way. But in another way it isn't, so long as their products can support the higher settings. But it is a moot point, since cheating or no, nV still gets beaten.

It's going to be very interesting to see what nV brings to the table for $3k. My guess: nVidia is coming late to the bit-coin party. So late, in fact, that when this $3k thing arrives all the bit coins will be history.
 
Personally the review should have been done with 290x's with proper cooling so downclocking isn't an issue and in turn showing real world gaming advantage this card has over crossfire. Instead of highlighting how poor the reference coolers are and AMD looking to the aftermarket for help.
 
neat wish i could afford one of these bad boys i've never had 2 cards much less 2 made into one.
 
Good news. Lets keep our fingers crossed that the green team answers this with a GTX790 with 12gb of ram that's not going to cost a Kings ransom. Clocked to a point where it can keep up with the 295X2. Nice to see a bit of real competition at the high end of the spectrum.
 
Blazemore said:
Personally the review should have been done with 290x's with proper cooling so downclocking isn't an issue and in turn showing real world gaming advantage this card has over crossfire. Instead of highlighting how poor the reference coolers are and AMD looking to the aftermarket for help.
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they not re-review 290X Xfired they just take what they have in their data base and mix it with the new tested 295X2, same with the 780TI SLI they use both reference design cooled.. if they use aftermarket 290X they also must use aftermarket 780TI SLI and all know its unfair to use aftermarket 780TI cards because they can reach way higher clocks at stock settings making unfair to review.. of course the gap in performance would very close knowing that aftermarket 780TI perform +20% better than aftermarket 290X specially overclocking involved. i actually agree to use reference design board..

This guy has no idea what he is talking about. We retest with new drivers all the time and specifically only use "old" results if the drivers have not changed. This is another reason our reviews take so long. Yes, there are sites out there that reuse old data that mismatch drivers, but we do NOT do that at HardOCP. - Kyle Bennett
 
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I wanted to add, what a concise and well-written review. I appreciate the effort that Brent (and likely Kyle, too) make in having a precise, methodological approach to this kind of premium-product review. A lot of thought went into the wording of this review, and it is noted and appreciated. It's professionally done--but it's never artificially dispassionate and condescending, as is the case with some other sites.
 
WaltC said:
It's going to be very interesting to see what nV brings to the table for $3k. My guess: nVidia is coming late to the bit-coin party. So late, in fact, that when this $3k thing arrives all the bit coins will be history.
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Yeah, if the Titan Z is not meant for gaming, I would love to see what Nvidia offers in the way of something like a fully enabled 780 Ti x2 for a GTX 790/795, however they will name it. AMD definitely made the right choice by opting for liquid cooling both GPUs. I wonder if Nvidia will do something similar, yet their GPUs tend to run cooler and they have the better reference coolers as well.

Pricing, on the other hand, is going to be purely speculative. At $1499, the 295X2 is about $750 per GPU, but you have to factor in the cost of the liquid cooler itself plus other components. If not on sale, the lowest priced 780 Ti is $699. So, we can assume that a 790/795 will be about $1400, and factoring additional components for cooling and other parts of the GPU, it might come in at the same price as the 295X2. We can only hope, though. If priced higher than 295X2 and offering no higher performance than two 780 Ti or a 295X2, then it wouldn't make sense to buy it if the 295X2 performs better and costs less.

So, let's see what Nvidia comes up with in response. I look forward to it.

Also, when DirectX 12 is released, I would like to see a comparison review between that and Mantle 2.0 (assuming that'll where it'll be in 2015 at the same time DX12 is released). A comparison or follow-up review using a 790/795, 295X2, 290X CF, 780 Ti SLI, 880 SLI, 890 (?) and 390 CF/395X2 (?) a year or two from now. I'd like to see not just how much an improvement there is between DX12 and DX11 with the current gen of cards, but see how much performance has improved between now and DX12's release.
 
Did I miss the card dimensions? I'm hoping this card might fit in a BitFenix Prodigy M case.
 
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