Advanced Micro Devices has announced that select retailers will sell its flagship dual-chip AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card for £500 for a limited time. A number of leading stores in the U.K. already offered the dual-GPU graphics board for about £500 on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Apparently, the low price will be effective for a longer period.

AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card, which carries two AMD Hawaii graphics processing units and 8GB of GDDR5 memory onboard, boasts whopping 5632 stream processors, 352 texture units and 128 raster operating units in total. Performance of the Radeon R9 295X2 graphics adapters matches that of two Radeon R9 290X graphics boards and at present this is the world’s highest-performing graphics card. The adapter features a custom closed-loop liquid cooling solution and requires a PC case with a lot of space inside.

After sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday a number of stores increased prices on the Radeon R9 295X2 to £569.99 – £599.99 including VAT and higher. The announcement by AMD means that potential buyers should expect certain Radeon R9 295X2 graphics cards to sell at around £500.

At about £500 the Radeon R9 295X2 graphics board no longer competes against ultra-high-end graphics adapters like GeForce GTX Titan Z or GeForce GTX Titan Black (which it outperforms). £500 is an average price of Nvidia Corp.’s GeForce GTX 980 single-chip graphics adapter, which is clearly behind AMD’s dual-GPU graphics solution in terms of performance (as well as in terms of power consumption, though).

Given that AMD does not slash its prices officially and claims that all price-cuts are a result of promotions by card vendors and retailers, at present there is no official prices for AMD Radeon-branded graphics adapters.

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KitGuru Says: Traditionally dual-chip graphics solutions provide extreme performance only in games that are multi-GPU friendly. In all other cases scalability of both AMD CrossFireX and Nvidia SLI remains moderate at best. Since the majority of multi-GPU cards historically featured lowered frequencies, one single-chip GPU with increased clock-rates could offer better performance than dual-GPU solutions in case of negligible multi-GPU scaling. However, the Radeon R9 295X2 features default AMD Radeon R9 290X clocks, which means that even in the worst-case scenario (when multi-GPU simply does not work) it will not be that far behind its actual rival, the GeForce GTX 980. In all other cases it will be ahead of it. Which one would you choose?

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