The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTOverclocking
Finally, no review of a high-end video card would be complete without a look at overclocking performance.
As was the case with the R9 Fury X two weeks ago, overclockers looking at out of the box overclocking performance are going to come away disappointed with the R9 Fury cards. While cooling and power delivery are overbuilt on both the Asus and Sapphire cards, the R9 Fury is still very restricted when it comes to overclocking. There is no voltage control at this time (even unofficial) 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.
| Radeon R9 Fury Series Overclocking | |||||
| Ref. R9 Fury X | ASUS R9 Fury | Sapphire R9 Fury OC | |||
| Boost Clock | 1125MHz | 1075MHz | 1100MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 1Gbps (500MHz DDR) | 1.1Gbps (550MHz DDR) | 1.1Gbps (550MHz DDR) | ||
| Power Limit | 100% | 115% | 100% | ||
| Max Voltage | 1.212v | 1.169v | 1.212v | ||
Neither R9 Fury card is able to overclock as well as our R9 Fury X, indicating that these are likely lower quality (or lower headroom) chips. Ultimately we’re able to get another 75MHz out of the ASUS, for 1075MHz, and another 60MHz out of the Sapphire, for 1100MHz.
Meanwhile with unofficial memory overclocking support now attainable via MSI Afterburner, we’ve also tried our hand at memory overclocking. There’s not a ton of headroom here before artifacting sets in, but we were able to get another 10% (50MHz) out of both R9 Fury cards.
Using our highest clocking card as a reference point, the Sapphire card, the actual performance gains are in the 7-10% range, with an average right up the middle at 8% over a reference clocked R9 Fury. This is actually a bit better than the R9 Fury X and its 5% performance gains, however it’s still not going to provide a huge difference in performance. We’d need to be able to overclock to better than 1100MHz to see any major overclocking gains on the R9 Fury cards.
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mickulty - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Looks fantastic! Definitely getting one of these once the stock is there.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Yes paper launch for the r9 390X ... newegg is dry as a bone and just 15 reviews with zero stock only sapphire had about 10 cards to sell otherwise NO STOCK AT NEWEGG AT ALL.it's july 16th and the r9 390x is vapor
figus77 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Got a Sapphire Fury Tri-X (non OC version) the 16/7 in Italy... probably is newegg problem... and really is a good card, with catalyst 15.7 i got very nice results... With my system 8320, 16gb 1600hz, in Tomb Raider 2560x1440 all maxed out with TressFX on, FPS MIN: 58,0 - MED: 75,3 - MAX: 94,0Really good results. Witcher3 run stable beetween 45 to 50 fps in ultra setting in 2560x1440 and that casr is really silent you can't hear anything even after some long time playing.
Jtaylor1986 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Almost makes you wonder if AMD should have just designed the card with 54 compute units and would have had a winner on it's hand. Fury X seems to be somewhat unbalanced in terms of it's hardware configuration.Asomething - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
This imbalance comes from gcn's limitations, amd tried to compensate with the extra shaders.Ranger101 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Another quality Gpu review from Anandtech, in addition to being so early. Best of both worlds.jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
The sapphire Tri-X cooling solutions performs impressively under load. I think this a consequence of the abysmal configuration forced on videocards by the ATX standard. The sapphire card can exhaust the hot air freely because of the short PCB, which proves we could use a replacement for ATX (or shorter PCB's)Ian Cutress - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It would be interesting to see the effect of having 2 or 3 cards in one system using that paradigm for sure.jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
interesting for sure, any change sapphire will send another card?jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
speaking of which, what happened to BTX?