In today’s world of unusual GPUs and hardware, an X user by the name GOK recently shared pictures of a unique AMD Radeon GPU. How is it unique, you ask? Try having a massive PCB and four Radeon GPUs attached to it.
As per the pictures, the massive Radeon board houses four GPUs in a 2×2 configuration, with each GPU surrounded by eight GDDR5 memory chips, and each segment with its own power delivery. As for which GPUs they are, they appear to be Radeon RX 470s, a mid-range GPU from the Polaris era that launched back in 2016.
The Radeon RX 470 offered 8GB of memory at the time, meaning that this Franken-GPU would’ve offered 32GB of combined memory. Power-wise, you can see the four 8-pin PCIe power connectors at the corner of the PCB in one of the pictures, but it should be made clear that the actual board power consumption is unknown.
As to why this card exists, it’s been speculated that whoever created this card, did so with cryptomining at heart. Years ago, gamers were struck by another kind of GPU shortage; GPU miners were buying up every GPU they could in bulk, with the Radeon RX 470 being one of the more popular models, primarily due to its consistent hashrate achievement in Ethereum mining.
Now, multi-GPU cards aren’t new by any stretch of the imagination and in all fairness, this isn’t AMD’s first foray into that realm. This writer remembers when the day they first tested the Radeon R9 295X2, a graphics card fitted with two R9 290X GPUs, had an operating clockspeed of 1.02GHz, 5,632 Stream Processors, 8GB GDDR5 VRAM, and a 512-bit memory bus.
That dual-GPU AMD monster was cooled by a single-fan 120mm Asetek cooler that had one tube attached to each GPU die. Oh, and the outputs were four mini-DisplayPort ports, meaning that you needed an adapter of sorts if you wanted to connect it via HDMI or a standard DisplayPort.
Over in NVIDIA’s court, the green team famously released the GeForce GTX Titan Z back in 2014, the same year as AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2. The card featured a combined 12GB GDDR5 VRAM, dual Kepler GPUs, and 5,760 CUDA cores.
(Source: GOK via X, Videocardz)
