The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review
by Ryan Smith on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
GRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
There’s little to say about GRID 2 other than that we continue to get amazing performance out of the game even though it’s still one of the best looking games in our benchmark suite. For what it is worth the 295X2 holds a distinct advantage over the GTX 780 Ti SLI at both resolutions we test – especially at 2160p – but even the relatively slow GTX 780 Ti SLI is delivering better than 120fps at 1440p and better than 60fps at 2160p, so the difference is somewhat academic (ed: 120Hz 4K monitors, anyone?)
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Smartgent - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
The card is watercooled!! not aircooled like Nividia chose to do with their 500W TitanZ. Ishould run very quiet, and should not affect your internal temps much, as long as you mount the radiator externally to your case.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
It's a shame they're not making a version with a larger liquid cooler. Would like to see it with a 2x120 CLC and an overclock.jtd871 - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
This card should have just been released with a full-cover block and let the enthusiasts/3rd-parties use whatever custom cooling they like.Rambon3 - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Great article. I wish I had a spare grand and a half to replace my 7970 CF set up. BTW It looks like you have an extra GPU Load temp chart on Page 17 where the Load noise chart should be positioned.randomhkkid - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
I may have missed it in the article but I don't think you mentioned whether or not it would be possible to add an additional fan on that asutek cooler? This would surely bring down stock temperatures (albeit increase the noise) if one was thinking about overclocking further.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Yes, it's possible. You would need to come up with a matching fan and the screws to mount it, but there's nothing from a hardware perspective keeping you from mounting a second fan for push-pull. I don't know if it's easily visible in our pictures, but the fan power connector is exposed mid-way along the cable run, so you can split it there to get a second fan power header.mpdugas - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
push-pull, perhaps?Gunbuster - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
The perfect card for high resolution multi monitor rigs, oh wait frame pacing is still broken. Don't worry, just send in your $1500 and they'll fix it sometime in 2015 (maybe)JDG1980 - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Pay closer attention to the article. Frame pacing is still imperfect *on the old 7990*, not on the R9 295X2. It works fine on GCN 1.1 cards (290/290X/295X2) due to the new XDMA engine.Admittedly, it was odd for them to throw in some 7990 bashing in the review of a new card, so I can understand the confusion.
Mondozai - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Why are you asking people to pay attention to articles they are commenting on?This is the internet.