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."

Comments

I felt a great disturbance in the Force...

[b0r0din]

as if millions of Litecoins suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Re:here's how stupid this is

[Dolda2000]

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.

Re:here's how stupid this is

[Dancindan84]

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).

Re:here's how stupid this is

[bulled]

Parent is mad because when he tried to dump cold water over his GPU it never ran the same afterwards...

Re:here's how stupid this is

[troon]

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.

Re:here's how stupid this is

[Chrisq]

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

Re:here's how stupid this is

[Rockoon]

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.

...except what we find out is that actually you only have just enough knowledge to look stupid because you overlooked important details such as the obvious limitations imposed by having your radiator mounted directly on the device being cooled.