The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTOverclocking
Finally, no review of a high-end video card would be complete without a look at overclocking performance.
To get right to the point here, overclockers looking at out of the box overclocking performance are going to come away disappointed. While cooling and power delivery are overbuilt, in other respects the R9 Fury X is very locked down when it comes to overclocking. There is no voltage control at this time (even unofficial), there is no official HBM clockspeed control, and the card’s voltage profile has been finely tuned to avoid needing to supply the card with more voltage than is necessary. As a result the card has relatively little overclocking potential without voltage adjustments.
So what do we get for overclocking?
| Radeon R9 Fury X Overclocking | ||||
| Stock | Overclocked | |||
| Boost Clock | 1050Mhz | 1125MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 1Gbps (500MHz DDR) | 1Gbps (500MHz DDR) | ||
| Max Voltage | N/A | N/A | ||
Our efforts net us 75MHz, which is actually 25MHz less than what AMD published in their reviewer’s guide. Even 100MHz would lead to artifacting in some games, requiring that we step down to a 75MHz overclock to have a safe and sustainable overclock.
The end result is that the overclocked R9 Fury X runs at 1125MHz core and 1Gbps memory, a 75MHz (7%) increase in the GPU clockspeed and 0% increase in the memory clockspeed. This puts a very narrow window on expected performance gains, as we shouldn’t exceed a 7% gain in any game, and will almost certainly come in below 7% in most games.
Our gaming benchmarks find just that. A few percent performance improvement there, a 5% improvement there. Overall we wouldn’t go as far as saying there no reason to overclock, but with such limited gains it’s hardly worth the trouble right now.
True overclocking is going to have to involve BIOS modding, a riskier and warranty-voiding strategy, but one that should be far more rewarding. With more voltage I have little doubt that R9 Fury X could clock higher, though it’s impossible to guess by how much at this time. In any case the card is certainly built for it, as the oversized cooler, high power delivery capabilities, and dual BIOS switch provide all the components necessary for such an overclocking attempt.
Meanwhile HBM is a completely different bag, and while unofficial overclocking is looking promising, as a new technology it will take some time to get a good feel for it and understand just what kind of performance improvements it can deliver. The R9 Fury X is starting out with quite a bit of memory bandwidth right off the bat (512GB/sec), so it may not be bandwidth starved as often as other cards like the R9 290X was.
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chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Pretty much, AMD supporters/fans/apologists love to parrot the meme that Intel hasn't innovated since original i7 or whatever, and while development there has certainly slowed, we have a number of 18 core e5-2699v3 servers in my data center at work, Broadwell Iris Pro iGPs that handily beat AMD APU and approach low-end dGPU perf, and ultrabooks and tablets that run on fanless 5W Core M CPUs. Oh, and I've upgraded also managed to find meaningful desktop upgrades every few years for no more than $300 since Core 2 put me back in Intel's camp for the first time in nearly a decade.looncraz - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
None of what you stated is innovation, merely minor evolution. The core design is the same, gaining only ~5% or so IPC per generation, same basic layouts, same basic tech. Are you sure you know what "innovation" means?Bulldozer modules were an innovative design. A failure, but still very innovative. Pentium Pro and Pentium 4 were both innovative designs, both seeking performance in very different ways.
Multi-core CPUs were innovative (AMD), HBM is innovative (AMD+Hynix), multi-GPU was innovative (3dfx), SMT was innovative (IBM, Alpha), CPU+GPU was innovative (Cyrix, IIRC)... you get the idea.
Doing the exact same thing, more or less the exact same way, but slightly better, is not innovation.
chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Huh? So putting Core level performance in a passive design that is as thin as a legal pad and has 10 hours of battery life isn't innovation?Increasing iGPU performance to the point it not only provides top-end CPU performance, and close to dGPU performance, while convincingly beating AMD's entire reason for buying ATI, their Fusion APUs isn't innovation?
And how about the data center where Intel's *18* core CPUs are using the same TDP and sockets, in the same U rack units as their 4 and 6 core equivalents of just a few years ago?
Intel is still innovating in different ways, that may not directly impact the desktop CPU market but it would be extremely ignorant to claim they aren't addressing their core growth and risk areas with new and innovative products.
I've bought more Intel products in recent years vs. prior strictly because of these new innovations that are allowing me to have high performance computing in different form factors and use cases, beyond being tethered to my desktop PC.
looncraz - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Show me intel CPU innovations since after the pentium 4.Mind you, innovations can be failures, they can be great successes, or they can be ho-hum.
P6->Core->Nehalem->Sandy Bridge->Haswell->Skylake
The only changes are evolutionary or as a result of process changes (which I don't consider CPU innovations).
This is not to say that they aren't fantastic products - I'm rocking an i7-2600k for a reason - they just aren't innovative products. Indeed, nVidia's Maxwell is a wonderfully designed and engineered GPU, and products based on it are of the highest quality and performance. That doesn't make them innovative in any way. Nothing technically wrong with that, but I wonder how long before someone else came up with a suitable RAM just for GPUs if AMD hadn't done it?
chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
I've listed them above and despite slowing the pace of improvements on the desktop CPU side you are still looking at 30-45% improvement clock for clock between Nehalem and Haswell, along with pretty massive improvements in stock clock speed. Not bad given they've had literally zero pressure from AMD. If anything, Intel dominating in a virtual monopoly has afforded me much cheaper and consistent CPU upgrades, all of which provided significant improvements over the previous platform:E6600 $284
Q6600 $299
i7 920 $199!
i7 4770K $229
i7 5820K $299
All cheaper than the $450 AMD wanted for their ENTRY level Athlon 64 when they finally got the lead over Intel, which made it an easy choice to go to Intel for the first time in nearly a decade after AMD got Conroe'd in 2006.
silverblue - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
I could swear that you've posted this before.I think the drop in prices were more of an attempt to strangle AMD than anything else. Intel can afford it, after all.
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Of course I've posted it elsewhere because it bears repeating, the nonsensical meme AMD fanboys love to parrot about AMD being necessary for low prices and strong competition is a farce. I've enjoyed unparalleled stability at a similar or higher level of relative performance in the years that AMD has become UNCOMPETITIVE in the CPU market. There is no reason to expect otherwise in the dGPU market.zoglike@yahoo.com - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Really? Intel hasn't innovated? I really hope you are trolling because if you believe that I fear for you.chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Let's not also discount the fact that's just stock comparisons, once you overclock the cards as many are interested in doing in this $650 bracket, especially with AMD's clams Fury X is an "Overclocker's Dream", we quickly see the 980Ti cannot be touched by Fury X, water cooler or not.Fury X wouldn't have been the failure it is today if not for AMD setting unrealistic and ultimately, unattained expectations. 390X WCE at $550-$600 and its a solid alternative. $650 new "Premium" Brand that doesn't OC at all, has only 4GB, has pump whine issues and is slower than Nvidia's same priced $650 980Ti that launched 3 weeks before it just doesn't get the job done after AMD hyped it from the top brass down.
andychow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Yeah, "Overclocker's dream", only overclocks by 75 MHz. Just by that statement, AMD has totally lost me.