Welcome back to another Extreme Rigs review. As the Radeon Pro Duo is launched it seems an appropriate time to look at a dual AMD GPU.  Now while we don’t have a Radeon Pro Duo we do have something similar. Today we are going to be looking at two very different but also very similar graphics cards. Both these cards are made by AMD and they both have “all in one” (AIO) liquid cooling units.

The R9-295×2 is a single PCB with two of AMD’s last generation GPU cores – fully featured Hawaii XT cores. Although the R9-295×2 features 8GB of VRAM it is divided per GPU core so that the usable VRAM is only 4GB. The Fury X on the other hand is AMD’s latest high end graphics card featuring a single fully featured Fiji XT core. It also has 4GB of VRAM, however instead of using GDDR5, the Fury X uses HBM VRAM instead. Again – they are similar but also very different.

While the R9-295×2 retailed for $1500 initially it can now be found for around $500 on the second hand market. The Fury X is still in short supply but retails for ~$650. Therefore a reader looking to buy an AMD  GPU with ~$600 in their pocket has some interesting choices to make. While the Fury X of course out paces a single gpu core of the last generation the R9-295×2 is a more interesting comparison. The R9-295×2 has the raw power to beat a Fury X, but does Crossfire live up to it’s expectations? Does the latest technology outsmart brute force? Let’s start off by taking a look at these two cards.

AMD Radeon R9-295X2

The box for the R9-295X2 is simply huge.  It’s a good bit bigger in every dimension than a large ATX motherboard box.

The box has plenty of marketing  – highlighting the liquid cooler, dual cores and 8GB of VRAM.  We would prefer that the VRAM was labelled as 2x4GB VRAM in order to be less confusing to those not so familiar with GPU technology.  This is especially true because there are two versions of the R9-390 and R9-390X – one with 4GB and one with 8GB.

Now because we bought our R9-295×2 second hand we didn’t get the usual bumf of marketing.  Instead we simply have the huge graphics card and it’s radiator unit:

The R9-295×2 like it’s predecessor the 7990 had a very forward thinking set of outputs – you get one DVI-D and 4 mini display ports.  Back in the 7990 days we wished that AMD would step it up with a 5th mini display port in order to better support their eyefinity technology advantage over Nvidia.  Having said that, with the recent jump in monitor pixels 5 panel setups are no longer in vogue simply because 1440p is the new normal and 4K the new hardcore.  5 displays worth of 4K is just too much for GPUs these days to handle.

The other thing we liked about the vga outputs on the 7990 were that it mean with an appropriate waterblock that it could be converted into a single slot card just as we did in our Project Thief build:

However the 7990 card was air cooled and could easily thermal throttle even under partial load at stock clocks.  The R9-295X2 was in desperate need of better cooling and the use of an AIO cooler means that the necessity of a waterblock is vastly reduced.

We’re not a huge fan of of the Radeon text in red that lights up, nor of the 2x8pin power connectors that exceed the normal specifications so significantly that you need to double check your power supply can handle it.  This is a card that desperately needs a third power connector.  In fact under heavy loading you can really feel the power supply cables getting hot because there is just so much current being fed into this monster.

The back of the video card gets a backplate which has thermal pads to connect to the GDDR5 VRAM on the rear of the card.  This backplate does get quite hot.  You can also see it has a lot of stickers on it that really distract from a clean professional look.

The cooling radiator is a fairly standard 120mm unit with a fairly standard looking fan.  The fan itself isn’t high RPM which means it never gets noisy, but it also means it can struggle to keep the coolant cold enough.  In our experience with the stock cooler there was no real thermal headroom to overclock the card when using this fan.  If you are serious about overclocking this card we would heavily recommend a watercooling block and a decent sized radiator.

Again there is another ugly sticker on the radiator itself, and the two wires for the fan make the tubing look uglier too.

The radiator itself has a semi shiny finish and the fins are reasonably high density.  This means it will need cleaning out for dust reasonably often.  The end tanks aren’t too large so there shouldn’t be too much of a problem mounting it:

153mm long x 120mm wide:

The radiator is not however as thin as some AIO units meaning the total depth of the radiator plus fan clocks in at 64mm.

Overall the R9-295×2 is a bit of an ugly duckling.  It’s most impressive feature is it’s size.  There is no doubt when you pick it up that this is a serious piece of kit.  It feels heavy and costly and powerful.