Although the days of AMD’s “small die” strategy have long since ended, one aspect of AMD’s strategy that they have stuck with since the strategy’s inception has been the concept of a dual-GPU card. AMD’s first modern dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2, came at a low point for the company where such a product was needed just to close the gap between AMD’s products and NVIDIA’s flagship big die video cards. However with AMD’s greatly improved fortune these days, AMD no longer has to play just to tie but they can play to win.
After weeks of teasing, AMD has finally revealed the Radeon R9 295X2, the first dual-processor graphics card that actually doubles the performance of a single-processor card. It’s got tubes. Tubes are cool. Well, tubes are cooling at least. Along with a single center fan that doesn’t seem like it would do much for a card that generates 11.5 teraflops of computing power and runs at a greedy 500 watts, AMD has built an asetek liquid cooling solution into the card, complete with integrated pump and a 120mm radiator and fan. AMD’s “Two is Better Than One” campaign leading up to the reveal of the Radeon 295X2 refers to the fact that, up until now, no dual-core graphics card has managed to actually double the performance of its single-core counterpart — two cards running in either AMD’s Crossfire or Nvidia’s SLI configuration have always yielded better results. At 11.5 teraflops to the R9 290X’s 5.6, the 295X2 changes that. With 8GB of GDDR5 memory and a dual 512-bit memory bus, it changes it quickly.
