[H] AMD Radeon R9 295X2 CrossFire Review

[tviceman]

Quadro and Tesla cards are irrelevant to Radeon R290 so those 18 months become much less when comparing products that actually compete with each other. Titan is also a special case not directly comparable to Radeons. Geforce 780/Ti are direct competitors to Hawaii cards whose release dates aren't so significantly apart. Saying that a card is already overclocked and overvolted from factory just shows you don't have a clue what you are talking about. What you wanted to say is that Hawaii is already clocked past its sweet spot from performance per watt perspective because it needs high voltage to maintain that clock (overvolted) and that it doesn't have much frequency headroom left (overclocked).

Wasn't talking about Quadro, Tesla, or Titan. But all my points still stand and if you disagree that Hawaii, being smaller, consuming more power, running hotter, and typically overclocks less than GK110, is not pushed harder at reference settings than GK110 then I really don't have much else to say to you. We would also disagree about something as simple as the color red, and how I do not think it at all looks like yellow.

 

[tviceman]

Quadro and Tesla cards are irrelevant to Radeon R290 so those 18 months become much less when comparing products that actually compete with each other. Titan is also a special case not directly comparable to Radeons. Geforce 780/Ti are direct competitors to Hawaii cards whose release dates aren't so significantly apart. Saying that a card is already overclocked and overvolted from factory just shows you don't have a clue what you are talking about. What you wanted to say is that Hawaii is already clocked past its sweet spot from performance per watt perspective because it needs high voltage to maintain that clock (overvolted) and that it doesn't have much frequency headroom left (overclocked).

It isn't irrelevant since the chip itself is entirely unchanged from Tesla to the first GTX 780 and was only shipping to the HPC specific market because of very high demand, margins, and the lack of immediate need to compete in the lower margin gaming card market. It's the same chip and didn't have the benefits of an extremely mature node process and being much smaller than the max allowable die size per TSMC's guidelines. Regardless, all my points still stand and if you disagree that Hawaii, being smaller, consuming more power, running hotter, and typically overclocks less than GK110, is not being pushed harder at reference settings than GK110 then I really don't have much else to say to you. We would also disagree about something as simple as the color red, and how I do not think it at all looks like yellow.

 

[Erenhardt]

Things I don't like about the article.



3. No 780 Ti crossfire results or 780 ti quad sli numbers to compare to or quad crossfire R290X. Why are there power numbers for 780Ti SLI but not performance numbers?
.

SLI still doesn't work on none-MST 4k monitors at the moment. There should be a driver out soon to fix that, but that is an example. 0% of games would work with that setup, no matter how much money you spent on GPUs.

 

[wand3r3r]

It is interesting that Mantle doesn't work with 4 GPUs, scaling really bad in MP.

I noticed that too. I was expecting some benefit but I realized that mantle helps where CPU limited and quad GPU is GPU bound.

 

[thilanliyan]

I noticed that too. I was expecting some benefit but I realized that mantle helps where CPU limited and quad GPU is GPU bound.

Shouldn't quad GPU be CPU bound?

 

[Erenhardt]

Shouldn't quad GPU be CPU bound?

No. No one will pay $3000 to be CPU bound.

 

[thilanliyan]

No. No one will pay $3000 to be CPU bound.

I thought an excess of GPU power (4 GPUs) in this case, would lead to a CPU bottleneck? I'm probably missing something. Despite having 3 7950s and 3 290s, I've never used multi GPU lol so don't know much about it.

 

[Erenhardt]

I thought an excess of GPU power (4 GPUs) in this case, would lead to a CPU bottleneck? I'm probably missing something. Despite having 3 7950s and 3 290s, I've never used multi GPU lol so don't know much about it.

Resolution etc.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I thought an excess of GPU power (4 GPUs) in this case, would lead to a CPU bottleneck? I'm probably missing something. Despite having 3 7950s and 3 290s, I've never used multi GPU lol so don't know much about it.

Would you mind sending my your 290's so I can use them correctly? :awe: :biggrin:

 

[Stuka87]

Resolution etc.

There are currently no games that will stress four top tier GPU's enough to still be GPU bound. Even with triple 4K displays. You will be CPU bound.

 

[thilanliyan]

Would you mind sending my your 290's so I can use them correctly? :awe: :biggrin:

Just as I'm about to watercool them??!! No chance!!

 

[Lepton87]

There are currently no games that will stress four top tier GPU's enough to still be GPU bound. Even with triple 4K displays. You will be CPU bound.

BS. One 2560x1440 is enough to bring my Titan to its knees, three such displays would be enough to do the same to 4 GPUs since they don't scale linearly and 4k has 2.2times more pixels then 2560x1440, go figure.

 

[3DVagabond]

BS. One 2560x1440 is enough to bring my Titan to its knees, three such displays would be enough to do the same to 4 GPUs since they don't scale linearly and 4k has 2.2times more pixels then 2560x1440, go figure.

This^^^

It's purely scaling. Mantle is just now beginning to enter Beta stage. It's been Alpha until now. It's not going to be anywhere near full featured and fully optimized.

 

[UaVaj]

I'm sure people who make the purchasing decision to go with Quad Fire/SLI know full well which games they are spending their time on.

good observation.

quad 290x here. bf4 the only game I play that needs this much gpu grunt. all the other games. a single 560ti be plenty.

 

[UaVaj]

this article is not worth its salt.

if they cannot even properly explain the psu shutdown issue. can only imagine the rest of the article.

reason why? it is because they exceeded the ocp on one of the 12v rail. they should learn to spread the load to other 12v rails.
1300w is more than plenty for that configuration. "ran out of wattage" what a fail.

 

[3DVagabond]

this article is not worth its salt.

if they cannot even properly explain the psu shutdown issue. can only imagine the rest of the article.

reason why? it is because they exceeded the ocp on one of the 12v rail. they should learn to spread the load to other 12v rails.
1300w is more than plenty for that configuration. "ran out of wattage" what a fail.

Assuming you are right, how would that invalidate the performance findings?