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Today we’re talking about AMD's new graphics card with two Hawaii XT GPUs and a liquid cooling system.
We have reviewed one of the original GeForce GTX 780 Ti and compared it with other graphics cards of this class and competitors. Also we have tested performance dependence of the video memory overclocking.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">ASUS made the first original Radeon R9 290 videocard which eliminates all disadvantages of reference design. But people always want something more.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/asus-radeon-r9-290.html" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></p>
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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 (sorry, Rage Fury MAXX), 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. AMD’s dual-GPU cards have evolved accordingly and these days they are the high-flying flagships of AMD’s lineup, embodying the concept of putting as much performance into a single card as is reasonably possible.
The last time we took a look at a new AMD dual-GPU video card was just under a year ago, when AMD launched the Radeon HD 7990. Based on AMD’s then-flagship Tahiti GPUs, the 7990 was a solid design that offered performance competitive with a dual card (7970GHz Edition Crossfire) setup while fixing many of the earlier Radeon HD 6990’s weaknesses. However the 7990 also had its shares of weaknesses and outright bad timing – it came just 2 months after NVIDIA released their blockbuster GeForce GTX Titan, and it also launched at a time right when the FCAT utility became available, enabling reliable frame pacing analysis and exposing the weak points in AMD’s drivers at the time.
Since then AMD has been hard at work on both the software and hardware sides of their business, sorting out their frame pacing problems but also launching new products in the process. Most significant among these was the launch of their newer GCN 1.1 Hawaii GPU, and the Radeon R9 290 series cards that are powered by it. Though Tahiti remains in AMD’s product stack, Hawaii’s greater performance and additional features heralded the retail retirement of the dual-Tahiti 7990, once again leaving an opening in AMD’s product stack.
That brings us to today and the launch of the Radeon R9 295X2. After much consumer speculation and more than a few teasers, AMD is releasing their long-awaited Hawaii-powered entry to their dual-GPU series of cards. With Hawaii AMD has a very powerful (and very power hungry) GPU at their disposal, and for its incarnation in the R9 295X2 AMD is going above and beyond anything they’ve done before, making it very clear that they’re playing to win.
A set of two high-end graphics cards must be a great performer. We had tested SLI setup of two GeForce GTX 780 Ti and now we can tell about our decision. Is this configuration a good choice from price-performance point of view? Where is hidden dangers of it
We have started a series of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti reviews. As you know, It is the fastest gaming videocard of today. And firstly we have tested GeForce GTX 780 Ti built by Zotac
Maxwell is the new GPU architecture from NVIDIA which will arrive in a lot of graphics cards this year. Let's talk about the first model based on this architecture.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">As the GPU company who’s arguably more transparent about their long-term product plans, NVIDIA still manages to surprise us time and time again. Case in point, we have known since 2012 that NVIDIA’s follow-up architecture to Kepler would be Maxwell, but it’s only more recently that we’ve begun to understand the complete significance of Maxwell to the company’s plans. Each and every generation of GPUs brings with it an important mix of improvements, new features, and enhanced performance; but fundamental shifts are fewer and far between. So when we found out Maxwell would be one of those fundamental shifts, it changed our perspective and expectations significantly.</span></p>
<div><span style="font-size: small;">What is that fundamental shift? As we found out back at NVIDIA’s CES 2014 press conference, Maxwell is the first NVIDIA GPU that started out as a “mobile first” design, marking a significant change in NVIDIA’s product design philosophy. The days of designing a flagship GPU and scaling down already came to an end with Kepler, when NVIDIA designed GK104 before GK110. But NVIDIA still designed a desktop GPU first, with mobile and SoC-class designs following. However beginning with Maxwell that entire philosophy has come to an end, and as NVIDIA has chosen to embrace power efficiency and mobile-friendly designs as the foundation of their GPU architectures, this has led to them going mobile first on Maxwell. With Maxwell NVIDIA has made the complete transition from top to bottom, and are now designing GPUs bottom-up instead of top-down.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">Nevertheless, a mobile first design is not the same as a mobile first build strategy. NVIDIA has yet to ship a Kepler based SoC, let alone putting a Maxwell based SoC on their roadmaps. At least for the foreseeable future discrete GPUs are going to remain as the first products on any new architecture. So while the underlying architecture may be more mobile-friendly than what we’ve seen in the past, what hasn’t changed is that NVIDIA is still getting the ball rolling for a new architecture with relatively big and powerful GPUs.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: small;">This brings us to the present, and the world of desktop video cards. Just less than 2 years since the launch of the first Kepler part, the GK104 based GeForce GTX 680, NVIDIA is back and ready to launch their next generation of GPUs as based on the Maxwell architecture.</span></div>
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<div><a href="http://anandtech.com/show/7764/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-750-ti-and-gtx-750-review-maxwell" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;">Read more...</span></a></div>
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<p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">We have tested younger model of Hawaii XT graphics card. What is performance drop compared to Radeon R9 290X? Can Radeon R9 290 be a powerful rival against Nvidia's GPUs?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/radeon-r9-290.html" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></p>
Things are quickly heating up for what should prove to be an interesting February in the desktop video card market. AMD has already been up to bat once this week with the launch of the Radeon R7 250X, pushing AMD’s Cape Verde GPU back into the picture as the new anchor of their $99 price point. Now just 3 days later AMD is coming up to bat again, this time with the Radeon R7 265.
The launch of the 250X earlier this week and now the 265 are part of a larger refactoring of AMD’s mainstream desktop product family. AMD is cutting prices and launching new products both to maintain and enhance their competitive position, and to fill holes in their lineup – however small – to cover as many price points as possible. The end result is that along with a price cut for the existing R7 260X, which will see AMD’s flagship Bonaire part drop to $119, AMD is also using this time to launch parts above it and below it in order to fill the holes this refactoring is creating.
A key part of that refactoring strategy will be today’s launch of the Radeon R7 265. With R7 260X dropping to $119 and R9 270 holding at $179 (MSRP), AMD has a $60 gap that needs to be filled with a new product, and R7 265 is that product. Based on AMD’s venerable Pitcairn GPU, R7 265 will be filling this gap by bringing a variant of the Radeon HD 7850 back to the market, creating a 3rd tier Pitcairn product for the 200 series. Compared to the 7850 that it’s based on, R7 265 is receiving the same GPU clockspeed and memory clockspeed bump that the 7870-derrived R9 270 series saw last year that will make the R7 265 a bit faster than the 7850 it functionally replaces and making it better suited to fill the gap between the R9 270 and R7 260X.
Meanwhile we also have on hand AMD’s Radeon R7 260 (vanilla). First announced back in mid-December and finally reaching shelves towards late January, R7 260 is AMD’s 2nd tier Bonaire part, creating a lower cost, lower performance variant of the R7 260X. Given the close timing of these launches, and since we’re already looking at one 260 series part today in the 265, we’ll also be taking a look at the 260 so that we can take a complete inventory of AMD’s $100-$150 lineup.