Bitcoin mining AMD

AMD has announced the Radeon R9 295X2 Graphics card. Powered by the Vesuvius XT GPU, which comprises a pair of Hawaii XT units, this is the dual-GPU powerhouse for the Graphics Core Next based graphics cards. This is a pair of Radeon R9 290X in crossfire, on a single board. It is a power hungry beast, operating well outside the PCI-E power specs, but supplying premium processing power.

Each Hawaii XT has 2816 shaders, giving the card a total of 5632 cores. It also has 2 x 176 TMUs and 2 x 64 ROPs. In contrast to previous dual GPU cards, which have always been underclocked compared to their single graphics processor counterparts, the R9 295X2 slightly overclocks the GPUs compared to the R9 290, and has a clock speed of 1018 MHz. It offers a throughput of 2 x 179.2 gigatexels/s and 2 x 65.2 gigapixels/s.

For compute workloads such as the Bitcoin mining, AMD graphics units have recently excelled at, the R9 295X2 can perform 5733 GFLOPS per GPU, exceeding all reference clocked graphics cards on the market. There is a total of 8 GB GDDR5 memory, or 4 GB per GPU. Each unit has a 512-bit memory interface, and is clocked at an effective 5 GHz, giving a bandwidth of 2 x 320 GB/s.

The card has a dual-slot, hybrid liquid/air cooler, along with a 120 mm radiator, and is 12 inches long. It has one DVI-D and 4 x mini-DisplayPort outputs, and can drive up to 6 displays with the use of an MST DisplayPort hub. The TDP is, as might be expected, double that of the R9 290X, or a massive 500 Watts. It only uses two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, so these need to provide a combined 425 Watts power. This is almost 40% above what the PCI-E specs allow for, and will be best suited to a high power PSU with a single 12 Volt rail.

Cards will be available from April 21, at an MSRP of $1499.