PowerColor R9 295X2 Review
Test Setup, Power Target and Temps
Published: 21st May 2014 | Source: PowerColor | Price: £1100 |
Test Setup
PowerColor R9 295X2
Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.6GHz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Corsair Dominator Platinum 2133
Corsair AX1500i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 7 x64
ASUS 4K Monitor
Power Draw
Unsurprisingly with two high-end GPUs in place the 295X2 is hardly sipping from your power socket. 700W is a monstrous amount to be drawing. Of course if you're rich enough to afford the card then your electricity bill will be of minimal concern.
Temperatures
Keeping such an extraordinary amount of graphics power cool is definitely a tough ask, especially given the heat that the Hawaii XT GPU chucks out. However the AIO solution of the 295X2 is extremely responsive to your temperatures setting, and can hit a set thermal target with ease. We have to confess that, for a water-cooling option, this is way hotter than we'd like to run our cards, but if we dampen the temperature any more the performance hit is ridiculous. If ever a product required a larger radiator, this is it.
As can be seen below you do have a performance trade off when you start to drop the cards temperature target. To get the card to run at 45c it hardly increased the fan speed but instead throttled the card to below 50%!
Most Recent Comments
Was it really that noticeable the card effecting the ambient temps and to push the CPU up by 10c...
I'm not surprised in the slightest about the 120 rad being unsuitable.. I mean come on AMD for 2 full fledged hawaii chips.. really. As Barnsley said it really should have been a 240 rad or at least the ability to somehow add it into a custom loop like the Poseidon.Quote
Edit: Sorry I cannot English today
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Originally Posted by MaddenShadow
Great review as always guv. There's a bit of a typo in the conclusion, though. It reads "patently" instead of "blatantly".
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"Patently"
Meaning In a patent manner; openly, plainly, or clearly..
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CSS Valid
I really want to see a 240 rad version. That would save the temperature issue. Kinda interesting to see that the fan that comes with the rad is crap/an airflow fan.
Red lighting. Do like. Especially now it doesn't have that weird thing on the fan.Quote