Water-cooling the AMD Radeon R9 295X2

Performance Analysis

Is it worth water-cooling a Radeon R9 295X2? Absolutely - if only for the hugely improved thermals compared to the stock liquid cooler and also the lower noise levels. Even with two fairly tame 120mm fans, the custom water cooling setup was much quieter under load.

Heat-wise, the difference here wasn't as spectacular as with our R9 290X adventure, but this is to be expected as you make the move from a relatively standard GPU air cooler to the R9 295X2's custom-made all-in-one liquid cooler. That said, even our 40mm thick double 120mm-fan radiator got noticeably warm under load, which really does emphasise the fact that there is room for improvement - 16°C, in fact, between the stock cooler and Aqua Computer Kryographics Vesuvius 295 X2 Acrylic Edition waterblock-based loop.


Performance was actually fairly surprising as the stock cooler kept up fairly well, even at our maximum overclock where we'd boosted the power limit to 150 percent with the core at 1,109MHz and memory at 6.6GHz effective. There was less than 100 points difference in Unigine Valley, although this advantage was enjoyed by the custom water-cooled setup across the board.

Conclusion

The performance numbers were a surprise as we expected a similar story to that in our R9 290X article, where water-cooling the card saw significant increases in performance with the stock air cooler not able to reign in the throttling. With the R9 295X2, the difference is certainly not worth investing in water cooling - in fact, it's not really worth spending any money on improved cooling looking at these figures. To be fair, you would expect the R9 295X2 to come with a competent cooling solution out of the box given how much it costs.

However, once again, water-cooling shines where it usually has done and battered the stock cooler on noise and thermals. Clearly, if you're gunning for a maximum overclock or just want a monsterously powerful system but without the noise that usually goes with it, adding an Aqua Computer Kryographics Vesuvius 295 X2 Acrylic Edition waterblock to your loop is a very good idea. Be warned, though - this thing dumps a shed-load of heat into the coolant and will likely need the equivalent of a double 120mm radiator all to itself if you're water-cooling other components too.