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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K_Space - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Reply from Ryan Smith (taken from the Fury X review comment section):"Curious as to why you would not test Fury OC's against the 980TI's OC?"
As a matter of policy we never do that. While its one thing to draw conclusions about reference performance with a single card, drawing conclusions about overclocking performance with a single card is a far trickier proposition. Depending on how good/bad each card is, one could get wildly different outcomes.
If we had a few cards for each, it would be a start for getting enough data points to cancel our variance. But 1 card isn't enough.
Will Robinson - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
LOL..cry moar fanboy.R9Fury defeats GTX980...deal with that and your other aggression issues.
D. Lister - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
It would be "a win" for the Fury if it offered 5-10% more performance at its resolution tier (1440p) at the same price. But at 8% more performance for 10% more price, as always under similar circumstances (i.e., near parity in performance/$), it all really boils down to brand preference/recognition.darckhart - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Too bad it requires so much cooling because that big ass heatsink on a much smaller pcb is just ridiculously proportioned. Should every model come with "reinforcement" or "stabilizers" to mitigate warping over time then? Still seems ridiculous though.xenol - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
You do realize that these aren't reference coolers (which would be the indication of what is required) and that both companies put out graphics cards with just as big of heatsinks? Hell, with the extra PCB space, they probably put more cooling on it because 10"-12" high end GPUs are normal, so why not put that space to use? NVIDIA did this with the GTX 670. The PCB was something like 8" long, but they stuck a 4" fan that overhung because why not.extide - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Wow, you really had to look pretty hard to find something to hate on there, didn't you.mikato - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Well it actually cools way better because the heat sink is longer than the PCB for obvious reasons. The shorter PCB is pretty much an advantage any way you look at it.FriendlyUser - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Great product. Buy+++IlllI - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd like to see a very in-depth article about why/how nvidia gpus are much more power efficient vs amd. I don't know how they managed it.xenol - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
The biggest contributing factors in Maxwell's efficiency is:1. Different organization of GPU controller units to execution units for better use of resources.
2. 256-bit bus (less lines to power)
3. Stuff that was done in Kepler (namely the lack of a hardware scheduler). AT's review on the GTX 680 covers a lot of this.