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."

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

[wisnoskij]

Also, it is LIQUID cooled, not water cooled. I am sure they find better liquids than water, bonus points for them if it does not conduct electricity and therefore will not fry your computer if you spill it all over it, and if they can make it evaporate without leaving a residue.

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

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Crypto

[Entropius]

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.