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 - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Oh, and also forgot his biggest mistake was vastly overpaying for ATI, leading both companies on this downward spiral of crippling debt and unrealized potential.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Uh...Bulldozer happened on Ruiz's watch, and he also wasn't able to capitalize on K8's early performance leadership. Beyond that he orchestrated the sale of their fabs to ATIC culminating in the usurious take or pay WSA with GloFo that still cripples them to this day. But of course, it was no surprise why he did this, he traded AMD's fabs for a position as GloFo's CEO which he was forced to resign from in shame due to insider trading allegations. Yep, Ruiz was truly a crook but AMD fanboys love to throw stones at Huang. :Dtipoo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Nooo please put it back, it was so much better with Anandtech referring to AMD as the taint :PHOOfan 1 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
At least he didn't spell it "perianal"Wreckage - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
It's silly to paint AMD as the underdog. It was not that long ago that they were able to buy ATI (a company that was bigger than NVIDIA). I remember at the time a lot of people were saying that NVIDIA was doomed and could never stand up to the might of a combined AMD + ATI. AMD is not the underdog, AMD got beat by the underdog.Drumsticks - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
I mean, AMD has a market cap of ~2B, compared to 11B of Nvidia and ~140B of Intel. They also have only ~25% of the dGPU market I believe. While I don't know a lot about stocks and I'm sure this doesn't tell the whole story, I'm not sure you could ever sell Nvidia as the underdog here.Kjella - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Sorry but that is plain wrong as nVidia wasn't just bigger than ATI, they were bigger than AMD. Their market cap in Q2 2006 was $9.06 billion, on the purchase date AMD was worth $8.84 billion and ATI $4.2 billion. It took a massive cash/stock deal worth $5.6 billion to buy ATI, including over $2 billion in loans. AMD stretched to the limit to make this happen, three days later Intel introduced the Core 2 processor and it all went downhill from there as AMD couldn't invest more and struggled to pay interest on falling sales. And AMD made an enemy of nVidia, which Intel could use to boot nVidia out of the chipset/integrated graphics market by not licensing QPI/DMI with nVidia having nowhere to go. It cost them $1.5 billion, but Intel has made back that several times over since.kspirit - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
That was pretty savage of Intel, TBH. I'm impressed.Iketh - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
or you could say AMD purposely finalized the purchase just before Core2 was introduced... after Core2, the purchase would have been impossibleWreckage - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/24/technology/nvidia_...AMD was worth $8.5B and ATI was worth $5B at the time of the merger making them worth about twice what NVIDIA was worth at the time ($7B)
In 2004 NVIDIA had a market cap of $2.4B and ATI was at $4.3B nearly twice.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidias-market-sh...
NVIDIA was the underdog until the combined AMD+ATI collapsed and lost most of their value. They are Goliath brought down by David.