In what seems to be a response to NVIDIA introducing their epic TITAN Z graphics card a few weeks ago, AMD has just unveiled their own contender. The Radeon R9 295X2 is not only the fastest graphics card ever built by AMD, it also costs half as much as the TITAN Z and will be launching with a price tag of $1500.
The R9 295X2 features two AMD Radeon R9 290X ASIC GPUs with 2816 shaders running at 1018MHz. This clock speed is faster than the R9 290X — AMD’s speediest single-GPU graphics card — and is the fastest Mantle-enabled graphics card on the market. With this card installed in your PC, you’ll be able to game at speeds you didn’t even think were possible.
To get the most out of the card, AMD placed the ASIC chips under an Asetek-built liquid cooling system. The integrated pump and waterblock assembly sits atop a high-turbulence plate and cools each chip individually. To cool the loop, AMD installed a 120x120mm single thick radiator. Because water is 24 times more effective than air at absorbing and transferring power, you won’t ever have to worry about overheating the R9 295X2.
Such powerful hardware requires even more powerful monitors. This graphics card is capable of supporting up to five simultaneous displays and with a little bit of tweaking you could even try some 12K gaming. But to utilize the entire resources of this card, you’ll need a display that is larger than 3840×2160. There’s no doubt that this card will offer impressive gaming performance, but you’ll also need to upgrade your monitors.
As dual-GPU graphics cards become more mainstream, we can only expect them to get better and (hopefully) less expensive. The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 is proof that you can pack virtually all the best components into a single unit and experience gaming at UltraHD resolution with incredible speed. And isn’t that what PC gaming is all about?
To read more about gaming hardware, visit GameCrate.