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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Chaser - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Oh yeah that invalidated the entire review. /facepalmStrychn9ne - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Great review here! It was a good read going through all the technical details of the card I must say. The Fury X is an awesome card for sure. I am trying to wait for next gen to buy a new card as my 280X is holding it's own for now, but this thing makes it tempting not to wait. As for the performance, I expect it will perform better with the next driver release. The performance is more than fine even now despite the few losses it had in the benches. I suspect that AMD kind of rushed the driver out for this thing and didn't get enough time to polish it fully. The scaling down to lower resolutions kind of points that way for me anyways.Peichen - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
AMD/ATI, what a fail. Over the past 15 years I have only gone Nvidia twice for 6600GT and 9800GT but now I am using a GTX 980. Not a single mid-range/high-end card in AMD/ATI's line up is correctly priced. Lower price by 15-20% to take into account the power usage, poor driver and less features will make them more competitivejust4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
At the high end you "may" have a point.. but what is the 960 bringing to the table against the 380? Not much.. not much at all. How about the 970 vs the 390? Again.. not much.. and in crossfire/sli situations the 390 (in theory..) should be one helluva bang for the buck 4k setup.There will be a market for the FuryX.. and considering the efforts they put into it I don't believe it's going to get the 15-20% price drop your hoping for.
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Slightly better performance while pulling less power and putting out less heat, and in the 970's case, is currently about $10 cheaper. Given that crossfire is less reliable than SLI, why WOULD you buy an AMD card?Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Maybe because people want decent performance above 3.5 GB of VRAM? Or they don't appreciate bait and switch, being lied to (ROP count, VRAM speed, nothing about the partitioning in the specs, cache size).medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Freesync?Built-in water cooling?
Disgust for nVidia's shitty buisness practices?
A brain?
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
How do you feel about the business practice of sending out a card with faults that you claimed were fixed?Or claims that you had the world's fastest GPU enabled by HBM?
Or claims/benches that your card was faster than 980Ti?
Or claims that your card was an Overclocker's Dream when it is anything but that and OCs 10% max?
A brain right? :)
sa365 - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
How do you feel about the business practice of sending out a card with faulty, cheating drivers that lower IQ despite what you set in game so you can win/cheat in those said benchmarks. It's supposed to be apples to apples not apples to mandarins?How about we wait until unwinder writes the software for voltage unlocks before we test overclocking, those darn fruits again huh?
Nvidia will cheat their way through anything it seems.
It's pretty damning when you look at screens side by side, no AF Nvidia.
Margalus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
freesync? not as good as gsync and is still not free. It takes similar hardware added to the monitor just like gsync.built in water cooling? just something else to go wrong and be more expensive to repair, with the possibility of it ruining other computer components.
Disgust for NVidia's shitty business practices? what are those? Do you mean like not giving review samples of your cards to honest review sites because they told the truth about their cards so now you are afraid that they will tell the truth about your newest pos? Sounds like you should really hate AMD's shitty business practices.