Sunday, February 28th 2016
AMD Radeon Fury X2 Reference Air Cooled?
AMD, which has been timing its upcoming dual-GPU "Fiji" graphics card to launch sometime this year, may have demoed a production version of the card in one of its launch partners, Falcon Northwest's, Tiki high-end gaming desktop, as a "VR developer box." AMD's Roy Taylor, in a recent tweet, captions a picture of this dev box as being "the world's best DirectX 12 VR developer box," leading the press to speculate that it's running the company's dual-GPU "Fiji" card.
A close look at AMD's VR dev box, through its windowed graphics card compartment, reveals an air-cooled AMD reference graphics card, which VideoCardz' trigonometry pins as being shorter than a Radeon R9 390X reference board. It could be a reference R9 380X, but then a reference dual-GPU "Fiji" PCB is roughly of the same length, and a R9 380X wouldn't earn the title of being the "world's best" from a senior AMD exec while there are faster AMD cards, such as the R9 Fury. The ability of the full-spec "Fiji" silicon to cope well with a rather simple air-cooler in the R9 Nano fans even more speculation that a dual-GPU "Fiji" board could make do with a powerful air-channel cooler.
Sources:
VideoCardz, TweakTown
A close look at AMD's VR dev box, through its windowed graphics card compartment, reveals an air-cooled AMD reference graphics card, which VideoCardz' trigonometry pins as being shorter than a Radeon R9 390X reference board. It could be a reference R9 380X, but then a reference dual-GPU "Fiji" PCB is roughly of the same length, and a R9 380X wouldn't earn the title of being the "world's best" from a senior AMD exec while there are faster AMD cards, such as the R9 Fury. The ability of the full-spec "Fiji" silicon to cope well with a rather simple air-cooler in the R9 Nano fans even more speculation that a dual-GPU "Fiji" board could make do with a powerful air-channel cooler.
39 Comments on AMD Radeon Fury X2 Reference Air Cooled?
Or we could just say Nvidia doesn't release 2x GPU cards to the general consumer like AMD does. I have personally seen more 295 cards then I have any other NV x2 gpu variant. So yes cost plays a huge factor.
www.anandtech.com/show/7765/nvidias-geforce-gtx-titan-black-no-compromises-for-gaming-compute
btw. the reason the Titan Z sucked, was also because it was too slow, they didn't had triple fans on it or hybrid like AMD had with the 295X2, they went for a single fan triple slot design, what basically was a big mistake as it slowed both GPUs down considerably (because the card was too hot for the GPUs to run at high clocks). And don't forget SLI scales somewhat poorly compared to Crossfire, that didn't help the card too. So, who buys a Titan Z for 3k$ when he can have a 295X2 for 1200$ (or was it 1500?), that also is faster and cooled by water? Yeah. I think BiggieShady nailed it.
The reason why Nvidia isn't doing a Titan X2 is simple: 1) Fury X CF is faster, if they go simple cooler again, because they run on max speed and the Titan X2 not. 2) Crossfire scales better than SLI. 3) they earn more money with customers buying 2x Titan X or 2x 980 Ti instead of just one card priced at 1000 or 1500-3000$ (depends if its a 980 Ti X2 or Titan X2). But basically the 1st reason is a big problem, they don't want a comparison where they lose again, like they lost to the 295X2 with their overly expensive Titan Z. 2x 980 Ti/Titan X is doing fine though.
Nvidia isn't doing a dual GPU card because they don't need it.
Two Nano styled thermal chamber coolers feed by a bower fan that moves air/pressure better than the blade fan of the relatively quiet Nano. Probably the best binned chips at fairly sedate 700-750Mhz clocks I doubt that fan would need to run all that fast. Heck I'll be surprise if it has two 8-pins
It's all about V-R...
A dual Nano card would indeed be better.