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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mickulty - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Well, Arctic's 6990 cooler wasn't far off. The arctic mono is good for 300W and it should be possible to fit two such heatsinks on one card. So it's possible. The resulting card would be absolutely huge though, and wouldn't be nearly as popular with gaming PC boutiques (IE the target market).Oh, VRM cooling might be an issue too. I guess a thermaltake-style heatpipe arrangement would fix that.
SunLord - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Huh looking at that board and layout of the cooling setup you can swap in two independent closed looped coolers pretty easily and try and overclock it if you want and since your rich if you buy this it's totally viable for any ownernsiboro - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Ryan, thank you for a wonderfully written and informative review. Appreciate much.behrouz - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Ryan Smith , Please Confirm this :The new nv's Driver Does Overclock GTX 780 Ti, From 928 to 1019Mhz.if So Temp should be increased.
behrouz - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
and also Power ConsumptionRyan Smith - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Overclock GTX 780 Ti? No. I did not see any changes in clockspeeds or temperatures that I can recall.PWRuser - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
I have a Antec Signature 850W sitting in the closet. 295X2 too much for it?It's this one: http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReview...
Dustin Sklavos - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Word of warning: do not use daisy-chained PCIe power connectors (i.e. one connection to the power supply and two 8-pins to the graphics card). If AMD wasn't going over the per-connector power spec it wouldn't be an issue, but they are, which means you can melt the connector at the power supply end. Those daisy-chained PCIe connectors are meant for 300W max, not 425W.We've been hearing about this from a bunch of partners and I believe end users should be warned.
PWRuser - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Thank you. According to specs my PSU could handle these GPU separately, I guess utilizing 2 PCIE slots via 2 separate cards alleviates the strain.extide - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
No it has nothing to do with how many cards or slots. It's how many CABLES from the PSU.Sometimes you can have a single cable with two pcie connectors on the end, one daisy chained of the other. What he is saying is, don't use connectors like that, use two individual cables instead.
Although, unless the PSU you are using has really crappy (thin) power cables, it should be OK even with a single cable. But yeah, it's definitely a good idea to use two!