AMD's upcoming flagship graphics card powered by the next generation Fiji GPU will be shipping with a closed loop liquid cooler. That's right, today we're bringing you an exclusive news update of AMD's hotly anticipated next generation top dog graphics card.

There has been a whirlwind of speculation, rumor and leaks about AMD's new Fiji flagship. And as we draw nearer to its final date of introduction we are able to chip away at the fact and at the fiction and sort them out one at a time.

Finally we can confirm to you that the new graphics card will indeed ship with a closed loop liquid cooling unit. The specific model in question is a 120mm Asetek based design variation from Cooler Master. The pre-filled water cooler is very similar to what AMD had already introduced with the R9 295X2 and the boxed retail version of the FX 9590.

AMD Fiji XT Coming With Cooler Master Liquid Cooler

We've reported earlier on Asetek's largest design win with an "undisclosed OEM" for desktop graphics products that will begin shipping in the first half of 2015. The design win is estimated to result in 2-4 million dollars in revenue for Asetek. Which would translate to selling between 50 to 100 thousands units. It was clear from the get-go that this "undisclosed OEM" was AMD. Soon afterwards a mysterious AMD Radeon graphics card cooling shroud was leaked. One that could potentially accommodate the Asetek liquid cooling design.

Let me briefly comment on this development in terms of AMD's recent history with liquid cooling. AMD had introduced the R9 295X2 ,which is still the fastest graphics card in the world, back in April. It was the very first reference designed graphics card to ship with liquid cooling. AMD had partnered with Asetek which is one of the largest players in liquid cooling to develop Project Hydra. Which what ended up cooling the R9 295X2.

A couple of months later AMD re-introduced its 5Ghz FX 9590 processor into retail with a new package. The updated package included a liquid cooling unit from Cooler Master which was used to replace the previously shipped closed loop water cooler from Asetek. The new unit was slightly cooler and quieter than the Asetek water cooler it replaced. So even though Cooler Master had actually licensed the design from Asetek, this goes to show what an industry veteran that specializes in cooling like Cooler Master can achieve with a few intelligent tweaks.

AMD's upcoming reference designed Fiji board powered R9 flagship will ship with a liquid cooler, however AMD's AIB partners such as Sapphire, XFX, HIS, Powercolor, GIgabyte, MSI and Asus may ship non-reference air cooled fiji boards as well.

Back to the question of "when ?", the shipping data indicates that the card is going through testing and validation. However make no mistake, just within a couple of weeks time AMD will be capable of demoing the new GPU, probably at GDC. And the shipping data indicates that AMD has enough in inventory to make this a possibility.

We've told you yesterday that AMD has something "Crazy" they're working on for GDC. And it may or may not involve a preview of Fiji but at this point it's certainly a realistic possibility. After all only a few days ago we learned that AMD is "putting the finishing touches" on the 300 series.

Let's quickly remind ourselves of the alleged specifications for Fiji XT. Also you can check out our in-depth coverage of the new memory technology which will be featured in the new GPU. Dubbed HBM, short for High Bandwidth Memory, it promises to be significantly faster than GDDR5 per while being dramatically more power efficient.

Wccftech Stream Processors Memory System Memory Bandwidth Memory Interface GPU Clock Speed Compute Performance AMD Fiji XT 4096 4GB Stacked HBM 512GB/S 4096bit Wide IO 1050Mhz+ ~ 8.6TFLOP* AMD Radeon R9 290X Hawaii XT 2816 4GB GDDR5 320GB/S 512bit GDDR5 1000Mhz 5.6TFLOP Nvidia GeForce GTX 980

GM204-400 2048 4GB GDDR5 224GB/S 256bit GDDR5 1216Mhz 4.6TFLOP

* Estimate based on SP count and clock speed.