AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review: Sapphire Tri-X Overclocked

[Blueberries]

If we had affordable solutions for 4k 144hz nobody would be in business.

There are no solutions at any price for 4k at 144 hz. Two 980 Ti's struggle to get to 60 in most of the games in TPUs test suite. Until Display Port 1.3 drops, ULMB grows into that realm, and we slough through two generations of GFX cards, it just ain't happening.

USB C / Thunderbolt 3.0 certainly allots for it.

It's just a matter of performance, and some day that performance will be trumped, and so on. Eventually these companies are going to realize that after a while consumers won't have anything worth dumping their money into.

Also, I'm sure a few Tesla K80's could do it, why couldn't they?

 

[obababoy]

Running with a 115 degree VRM is just asking for a dead card. If you can't get enough performance out of this at a reasonable clockrate then just wait for a dual GPU card like everybody else. Why you would want a hotter louder card for something that's only useful for video games is beyond me, especially when you're blowing $600+ on it.

Also, wasn't the whole point of the Fury X to be a small card? Putting this massive heat-sink on and three fans for no noticeable impact is just asinine.

The whole point of Fury X was to be a small card...YES. Fury is a different story. ANY gamer with a mid-tower can run these large GPU's fine! If you want a small form factor, wait for R9 nano or get the Fury-X. These stay pretty cool on air unless put under un-natural stress tests which never happen in real world. The VRM temps are a bit worrisome and surprising considering my Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 has vrm temps around 60c...Louder? PCper.com noted these are noticeably quieter than the NVidia cards on air. Not sure where you feel that is true...

This model seems to prove less is more. Looks like Tom's found the right suites and Res to make the FuryX look much better too.

I have to agree. They turned down the game settings and custom tuned them, used a mixture of overclocks as well as reference and custom cooling. We aren't looking at budget limited mid range cards where you will accept compromises, these are the current AMD and Nvidia flagships. Like anyone at home playing games is going to fine tune the game settings. When playing a game I set it to ultra settings and play. I further stress my cards by often playing at high speeds settings to move the action along faster. I pushed my 970sli into the top slow memory that no one else seemed to be able to find and it went into zombie mode.

If my graphic card can't handle it then I look at other solutions like overclocking it to the max, closed loop water cooling (red mod), crossfire/sli or simply buying a better card. Apparently something is holding Fury back from being able to handle the ultra/max details. Even the 390x with its 8gb of memory starts to match Fury at ultra/max settings. With the death of mantle AMD doesn't have any excuses and will have to perform using DX12 or fail.

Haha wrong! I go into a game and adjust settings all the time even with a top end card. For instance on AMD's side there are some good(credit to NV) and terrible(also credit to NV) settings in games which are either poorly optimized for AMD or inflate tessellation for no reason which AMD doesn't do well. Either way, I turn off some of those settings even if I have the best card because they rarely actually improve fidelity to an extent that warrants the performance loss.

To your credit, the deviation in setups was a bit frustrating this time with Tom's setup. I agree with you there. TBH drivers are premature but there isn't going to be a huge increase with this line of AMD products. 390x is overpriced for the performance. 8gb vram is useless unless you CF it, in which case I would much rather save money and get the 290 8GB versions. Fury is a great buy if you want to stay AMD and are at least on something slower than R9 290. Fury X is a sweet card for people who want a SFF or great temperatures that wont bake their office and don't mind paying an inflated premium for it. 980 and 980ti are priced pretty damn well, perform great, but if you are like myself, id rather lose 10% performance than be with NV and my awesome ASUS MG279Q means AMD for life! 😉

With all that said, I decided to get a freesync monitor after the Fury X and Fury reviews because the cost for them isn't worth it and I would rather hang on to my R9 290 OC @ 1175mhz @75C and wait for there next variant sometime next year. The bump to 1440p hurt the performance but freesync makes it all buttery smooth within the range (which most titles easily do on my card).

 

[Reaver192]

Hey, TOMS<<<<<<<<<<<<<<FIX THE ARROWS ALREADY PLEASE??????? IS IT THAT HARD?????????????? GET A COLLEGE KID WHO IS POOR TO DO IT FOR YOU, IT'S NOT VERY HARD..............

 

[Blueberries]

Running with a 115 degree VRM is just asking for a dead card. If you can't get enough performance out of this at a reasonable clockrate then just wait for a dual GPU card like everybody else. Why you would want a hotter louder card for something that's only useful for video games is beyond me, especially when you're blowing $600+ on it.

Also, wasn't the whole point of the Fury X to be a small card? Putting this massive heat-sink on and three fans for no noticeable impact is just asinine.

The whole point of Fury X was to be a small card...YES. Fury is a different story. ANY gamer with a mid-tower can run these large GPU's fine! If you want a small form factor, wait for R9 nano or get the Fury-X. These stay pretty cool on air unless put under un-natural stress tests which never happen in real world. The VRM temps are a bit worrisome and surprising considering my Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 has vrm temps around 60c...Louder? PCper.com noted these are noticeably quieter than the NVidia cards on air. Not sure where you feel that is true...

My point was that overclocking leads to higher temperatures (as well as noise) and it clearly isn't worth it on these cards. I was confused as to the Fury / Fury X nomenclature, but overall my point remains the same, these cards aren't worth overclocking past factory overclocks. The benefit, if any, isn't worth the cost.

 

[littleleo]

If we had affordable solutions for 4k 144hz nobody would be in business.

There are no solutions at any price for 4k at 144 hz. Two 980 Ti's struggle to get to 60 in most of the games in TPUs test suite. Until Display Port 1.3 drops, ULMB grows into that realm, and we slough through two generations of GFX cards, it just ain't happening.

I think Pascal and AMDs Greenland will both get us closer to 144Hz 4K gaming. Only because we have been on 28nm for quite a while and we have gone pretty far. A Fury X is quite a bit more powerful than the first 28nm GPU, the HD7970, and as is a GTX 980Ti. A die shrink alone should lower heat/power and increase performance by adding cores. As well both will be on HBM 2 and have other enhancements.

To top that all off we should have games using DX12 which should provide a bit of a boost in some cases.

Will AMD put a HDMI 1.4a port on them?

 

[jimmysmitty]

If we had affordable solutions for 4k 144hz nobody would be in business.

There are no solutions at any price for 4k at 144 hz. Two 980 Ti's struggle to get to 60 in most of the games in TPUs test suite. Until Display Port 1.3 drops, ULMB grows into that realm, and we slough through two generations of GFX cards, it just ain't happening.

I think Pascal and AMDs Greenland will both get us closer to 144Hz 4K gaming. Only because we have been on 28nm for quite a while and we have gone pretty far. A Fury X is quite a bit more powerful than the first 28nm GPU, the HD7970, and as is a GTX 980Ti. A die shrink alone should lower heat/power and increase performance by adding cores. As well both will be on HBM 2 and have other enhancements.

To top that all off we should have games using DX12 which should provide a bit of a boost in some cases.

Will AMD put a HDMI 1.4a port on them?

Greenland will more than likely have HDMI 2.0 since it is to be released in 2016.

 

[Blueberries]

If we had affordable solutions for 4k 144hz nobody would be in business.

There are no solutions at any price for 4k at 144 hz. Two 980 Ti's struggle to get to 60 in most of the games in TPUs test suite. Until Display Port 1.3 drops, ULMB grows into that realm, and we slough through two generations of GFX cards, it just ain't happening.

I think Pascal and AMDs Greenland will both get us closer to 144Hz 4K gaming. Only because we have been on 28nm for quite a while and we have gone pretty far. A Fury X is quite a bit more powerful than the first 28nm GPU, the HD7970, and as is a GTX 980Ti. A die shrink alone should lower heat/power and increase performance by adding cores. As well both will be on HBM 2 and have other enhancements.

To top that all off we should have games using DX12 which should provide a bit of a boost in some cases.

Will AMD put a HDMI 1.4a port on them?

LOL. We will see

 

[MasterMace]

I'm glad AMD has returned to their position of having more performance using more power, at the same dollar and heat values as NVidia.

 

[MentalMetal]

UP VOTE if you agree with removing the arrows on the sides of the benchmark slides!

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