The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTThe Test
On a brief note, since last month’s R9 Fury X review, AMD has reunified their driver base. Catalyst 15.7, released on Wednesday, extends the latest branch of AMD’s drivers to the 200 series and earlier, bringing with it all of the optimizations and features that for the past few weeks have been limited to the R9 Fury series and the 300 series.
As a result we’ve gone back and updated our results for all of the AMD cards featured in this review. Compared to the R9 Fury series launch driver, the performance and behavior of the R9 Fury series has not changed, nor were we expecting it to. Meanwhile AMD’s existing 200/8000/7000 series GCN cards have seen a smattering of performance improvements that are reflected in our results.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 Fury X AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 285 AMD Radeon HD 7970 ASUS STRIX R9 Fury Sapphire Tri-X R9 Fury OC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 352.90 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.7 |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
"What exactly is the logic there?"I really need to spell it out for you?
The logic is that the 480 was a successful product despite having horrid performance per watt and a very inefficient (both in terms of noise and temps) cooler. It didn't get nearly the gnashing of teeth the recent AMD cards are getting and people routinely bragged about running more than one of them in SLI.
CiccioB - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
No, it was not a successful product at all, though it was still the fastest card on market.The successful card was the 460 launched few months later and surely the 570/580 cards which brought the corrections to the original GF100 that nvidia itself said it was bugged.
Here, instead, we have a card which uses a lot of power, it is not on top of the charts and there's really no fix at the horizont for it.
The difference was that with GF100 nvidia messed up the implementation of the architecture which was then fixxed, here we are seeing what is the most advanced implementation of a really not so good architecture that for 3 years has struggled to keep the pace of the competitions which at the end has decided to go with a 1024 shaders + 128bit wide bus in a 220mm^2 die space against a 1792 shader + 256bit wide bus in a 356mm^2 die space instead of trying to have the latest fps longer bar war.
AMD, please, review your architecture completely or we are doomed with next PP.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
"No, it was not a successful product at all"It was successful. Enthusiasts bought them in a significant number and review sites showed off their two and three card rigs. The only site that even showed their miserable performance per watt was techpowerup
Count Vladimir - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
So we are discussing 6 year old products now? Is that your version of logic? Yes, it was hot, yes, it was buggy but it was still the fastest video card in its era, that's why people bragged about SLI'ing it. Fury X isn't.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
"So we are discussing 6 year old products now?" strawmancelebrevida - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Looks like Jason Evangelho of PCWorld has the matter settled. In his article:http://www.pcworld.com/article/2947547/components-...
He shows that R9 Fury x2 is on par with GTX 980 Ti x 2 and blows away GTX 980 x2. Considering that R9 Fury x2 is much cheaper than GTX 980 Ti x2 and also R9 Fury is optimized for upcoming DX12, it looks like R9 Fury is the clear winner in cost/performance.
xplane - Saturday, October 17, 2015 - link
So with this GPU I could use 5 monitors simultaneously? Right?kakapoopoo - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link
i got the sapphire version up to 1150 stably using msi after burner w/o changing anything else