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AMD Unveils the Liquid-Cooled, Dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2 At $1,500
wesbascas (2475022) writes "This morning, AMD unveiled its latest flagship graphics board: the $1,500, liquid-cooled, dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2. With a pair of Hawaii GPUs that power the company's top-end single-GPU Radeon R9 290X, the new board is sure to make waves at price points that Nvidia currently dominates. In gaming benchmarks, the R9 295X2 performs pretty much in line with a pair of R9 290X cards in CrossFire. However, the R9 295X2 uses specially-binned GPUs which enable the card to run with less power than a duo of the single-GPU cards. Plus, thanks to the closed-loop liquid cooler, the R9 295X doesn't succumb to the nasty throttling issues present on the R9 290X, nor its noisy solution."
as if millions of Litecoins suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
The point with liquid cooling isn't to replace the metal in contact with the chip, you know. It's to replace the air that is normally cooling the metal.
I really hope this post is a joke.
Not sure: my sarcasm detector is on the fritz today.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's not so much the thermal conductivity of the GPU->water vs. GPU->copper heatsink that's the direct benefit. It's using the water to carry the heat to a much larger radiator rather than having to have the heatsink directly on the GPU (which greatly limits its size).
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Parent is mad because when he tried to dump cold water over his GPU it never ran the same afterwards...
Oh dear.
Water flows, due to being liquid. Copper, on the other hand, is a solid at any temperature you're going to have at home.
You circulate the water between the heat-producing surface and a heat-dissipating radiator.
Ydco co
Thermal conductivity of water: approx 0.58 Thermal conductivity of copper: approx 401 The only reason to have water cooling in anything is to brag to your friends that you have water cooling. In reality, metal cooling works better.
Easy solution, Run your CPU at over 1,085 C and use molten copper as a coolant
To be fair most of the review is graphs and to answer your question sometimes. I'm just hoping some 3rd party vendor will release this card with standard attachments for hose barbs so I can just drop this card into my already watercooled computer. I don't want another fan/pump/rad assembly when I can just add this card into my current loop.
Didn't find any need for the $1000 Titan card, doubtful I will find a need for a $1500 flavor either.
Patience works well. Wait a year or two and you can pick up this awesome horsepower at a fraction of the price. Pick up any games that require this much horsepower at the same time and you're golden. It's similar to how I buy games today. I'll be damned if I'm paying full price for what is effectively Beta III. I'll let them sit for a while, let the world test it and complain, watch all the patches get applied and ultimately pick it up when it goes on sale for $20 or so.
I learned long ago to quit buying bleeding edge gear.
I design cooling systems for high-heat semiconductors.
So we can expect you to be pretty knowledgeable about stuff, not overlooking important details, and understanding the various limitations imposed by each method...
Guess what? Liquid cooling SUCKS as you're still limited by how fast you can transfer the heat to the air ultimately.
"His name was James Damore."
Thermal conductivity of water: approx 0.58 Thermal conductivity of copper: approx 401 The only reason to have water cooling in anything is to brag to your friends that you have water cooling. In reality, metal cooling works better.
The water (.58) replaces the air (.024) in the cooling setup, not the metal. Watercooling systems tend to have markedly smaller heatsinks, since they just don't need the same surface area(at the low end, just a copper plate with a flow chamber on top of it, some more complex designs use something more or less similar to a small air-cooled heatsink; but sealed for water to flow through.
Now, I think that there have been a few nutty-and-exotic liquid-metal cooling systems; but those are hampered by the fact that they just aren't better-enough than water for the money (the delta T of the CPU's package and the waterblock is still the same), pumping the (substantially denser) liquid metal is more energy intensive, and most candidates are either unpleasant or expensive, or both.
If you want something that won't go all hazmat on you if the system leaks; but won't harden in the cooler parts of the loop, 'Galinstan' is probably the best bet; but you sure don't make things cheap by making them ~ 20% indium.
If you are...aggressively risk tolerant... a nice Cesium/Potassium/Sodium alloy will stay liquid to almost -80 (celsius); but, um, not a good plan, OK. Straight Mercury works fine down to almost -60; but that stuff is dense and not particularly pleasant(plus, it amalgamates with a number of metals quite readily. You did check your waterblock, radiator, pump, and all other contact surfaces for compatibility, right?). If you aren't the kind of coward whose dishonor makes him cry about things like "my cooling system catching fire on exposure to air or water vapor", NaK is a lovely coolant.
Basically, for something that is such a pain in the ass, you'd better be getting results substantially superior to normal air or water cooling, which you'll only get with active heat pumps that can actually pull the CPU below room temperature. At that point, the rather low freezing points of any available metal alloy become an insurmountable problem. Other materials don't have quite the same thermal conductivity; but they'll be happy enough keeping things well below the -100.
So finally, AMD came out with a power algorithm that reduces power consumption when the resources of the GPU aren't needed. I'm not sure where in their product line they introduced it, but it's about damn time. There are all kinds of good reasons to leave our computers on all the time, but I haven't been doing it because the idle power consumption has been needlessly high - in my case, over 50 watts. This adds up over time. Just how much power does a high-end computer need to idle, serve files, run non-demanding background processes, etc.? Millions of computers do just that, for many hours every day. A focus on reducing the power draw of these basically idling computers could make a huge difference to the world.
And they all sold out instantly and the Litecoin difficulty went up ...
Are there any dual-chip cards that cryptominers actually buy? (honest question, I don't know). Back in my youthful gaming-nut days, dual GPU cards, because of some mixture of worse economies of scale and 'people who absolutely must have the bleeding edge will pay, so why not?', always commanded rather more than twice the price of two equivalent single-GPU cards (and sometimes clocked worse, as well, just to keep the heat down).
Now that everything is PCIe, and the low bandwidth requirements of mining allow you to stuff even x1 slots with GPU cards, I'd have to imagine that your miner would be willing to pay only a very small premium to conserve slots.
Mostly they use distilled (or if you are feeling fancy, deionized) water with some additive. You can add alcohol, but I would prefer an automotive coolant additive. You could use redline water wetter, for example. I'd just go ahead and install a normal automotive coolant, which comes in a variety of colors. I'd want a low-silicate coolant without any special additives. The old-fashioned green stuff (ethylene glycol) is my favorite. Use about 25 percent to retard corrosion. If you want to get really nerdy, mount a voltmeter in the system. Ground to the metal of the water block or the radiator and suspend the positive electrode in the coolant solution. If you're making more than about 100mV then change the coolant. The meter is under ten bucks, digital or analog. Use a stainless or brass electrode to reduce corrosion of the electrode itself. A screw of appropriate length pushed through the top of the reservoir and sealed with epoxy or goop (tm) will serve.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You don't need the memory bandwidth for Scrypt mining, so you can use whatever card you want in a x1 slot, with the help of a riser/cable.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Even a low-ish end GPU is many times faster than the fastest CPU.
CPU's are optimized to make single threads go fast; GPU's are essentially massively parallel processors (hundreds of "cores") optimized to make a collection of threads doing similar things go very, very fast.
The conventional wisdom in my field of computational physics is that one GPU = 30 or 40 CPU cores.
Or a Rage II Pro!
You are welcome on my lawn.
He was told a Steam box is great for playing games...