The Card

The Radeon Pro Duo retains the design-language AMD introduced with the Radeon R9 Fury X and the Radeon R9 300 series (reference cards). Matte-black meets nickel-chrome, and AMD's glowing red "Radeon" logo. By picking a liquid-cooling solution for the Pro Duo, AMD saved on a ton of space that would otherwise be occupied by a bulky air-cooling solution (such as the 2.5-3 slot reference cooler on the GTX TITAN Z).


The card itself has a very solid and "monolithic" appearance to it. This comes at a cost as all that heat soaked up by the coolant has to be expunged somewhere, and that's where the rest of the solution kicks in - a thick 120 mm radiator with a factory-fitted high-end fan and tubing that connects the card to it. The Radeon Pro Duo appears to have slightly longer coolant tubing than found on the R9 Fury X. This is because its fittings on the card are toward the front rather than the rear, like on the R9 Fury X. The additional tubing should give you increased flexibility for placing the radiator at just the right vent.

The Pro Duo is a long card (27 cm long), although it's shorter than some of its immediate predecessors, the R9 295X2 and HD 6990 (both upwards of 30 cm). This is one of the key dividends of AMD's decision to go with a stacked HBM multi-chip module for the "Fiji" silicon. AMD is spending crucial PCB real-estate it saved on a more meaty VRM, with its hot components (IR DirectFETs) better spread out.


The Cooler Master-sourced cooling solution consists of two AIO pump-blocks for the GPUs, connected to the coolant loop in serial; with an additional heatsink that transfers heat to the blocks, which cools the VRM and PCIe bridge chip.


On the PCB, you can find a 4+2 phase VRM system per GPU, which draws power from a whopping three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Along with the slot power, this card is capable of drawing up to 525W of power. This isn't necessarily the card's rated power draw.


The Radeon Pro Duo features two 28 nm "Fiji" GPUs with all 4096 stream processors enabled on each chip. Their core clock speed is set at "up to" 1000 MHz, and memory sits at 500 MHz. The R9 Nano had its core clocked at up to 1000 MHz as well, but performed vastly different from the R9 Fury X, which was clocked just 50 MHz higher. Given this card's meaty VRM and cooling, we're inclined to believe that AMD could give these chips a more laxed power-management tuning.