World's most powerful graphics card for Litecoin mining announced

Advanced Micro Devices, affectionately known as AMD, the company that brought us the Athlon CPU in the late nineties providing unsurpassed speed to desktops worldwide, have just announced their latest beast - the Radeon R9 R295X2, claiming it to be the most powerful graphics card in the world.

For those of you who are into your PC gaming, you'd know that the first real GPU wars started in the mid-nineties, between Nvidia and 3dfx. Eventually Nvidia acquired 3dfx, but there was a new player in town - ATI, who introduced their Radeon line of graphics card, offering graphics as powerful as Nvidia's line of Geforce cards, and so a new generation of GPU wars had begun. All this, whilst, the CPU wars were on going between Intel and AMD. Unfortunately, since the Athlon days, AMD has been unable to keep up with the innovation of Intel, so whilst they've effectively failed to provide a strong enough competition to Intel in terms of CPUs, they have however been able to compete against Nvidia in the GPU space (admittedly by buying ATI a few years ago).

Ok, so what does this all have to do with Litecoin mining? Well, right now, it's only Nvidia and AMD who can provide graphics cards that can mine Litecoins at an acceptable rate. The two companies are always trying to out do each other with their respected cards, each one claiming that theirs is the best for PC gaming.

The thing is, AMD don't officially sanction their cards for crypto coin mining, but miners know one thing, when they come out with the claim, "most powerful graphics card", then it means it's also the most powerful card for mining as well.

Step forward the new Radeon R9 R295X2, a dual GPU based graphics card with liquid cooling, set to be launched on the 21st of April, retailing at $1500.

Ironically, last week Nvidia announced the Titan Z graphics card, also claiming insane performance, except at a very hefty price tag - $3000. Unfortunately for Nvidia, they've been outmanoeuvred by AMD, who have basically poured water all over Nvidia's fire, announcing a card that's just as fast (if not faster), at half the price. Quite ludicrous.

AMD knows that the crypto currency mining industry is only going to get bigger, and they're going to try and protect their position as the number one choice for Litecoin and Dogecoin mining. Also, the way Nvidia's card works, it's actually not very good for mining. I expect Nvidia will soon jump on the bandwagon soon, to produce a card which not only has excellent gaming performance, but decent mining performance too. Their current Maxwell brand of cards can do a job for mining, but aren't much use to heavy gamers.

Put simply, if you want a graphics card for the ultimate gaming or mining performance, nothing beats AMD's new Radeon R9 R295X2.

Anandtech have a detailed review of the Radeon R9 R295X2.