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Today we take a look at AMD's second graphics card based on the 28nm ‘Fiji' Silicon. The Sapphire Fury card is the first to hit our labs, and it features a new version of their highly acclaimed ‘Tri-X' cooling solution. To reduce the retail price against Fury X – the new (non X) Fury model ditches the all in one liquid cooler and has 56 of the 64 compute units on the silicon enabled to yield a total of 3,584 stream processors. At around £445 inc vat it is priced almost identically to rival GTX980 solutions – but can it compete?
There is no doubt that Fury is an important SKU for AMD as it is going to be priced around £80+ less than the flagship Fury X, subsequently targeting a broader enthusiast audience interested in buying a modified GTX980.
The Fury X card certainly has potential (review HERE) but AMD really need to work on dropping UK prices a little – £530 to £600 (OCUK prices at time of publication) is going to a difficult sell for them right now. Some good news for potential Fury X customers – from what we have been told, Revision 2 of this card is already hitting retail – with noted pump and coil whine issues resolved. The Fury X walked away with our ‘Worth Considering' award last week and it will be interesting to see how the Sapphire's Tri-X air cooler deals with the Fiji architecture.
If you want a brief recap of Fiji, the new architecture and HBM memory, visit this page.
| GPU | R9 390X | R9 290X | R9 390 | R9 290 | R9 380 | R9 285 | Fury X | Fury |
| Launch | June 2015 | Oct 2013 | June 2015 | Nov 2013 | June 2015 | Sep 2014 | June 2015 | June 2015 |
| DX Support | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Process (nm) | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Processors | 2816 | 2816 | 2560 | 2560 | 1792 | 1792 | 4096 | 3584 |
| Texture Units | 176 | 176 | 160 | 160 | 112 | 112 | 256 | 224 |
| ROP’s | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 32 | 32 | 64 | 64 |
| Boost CPU Clock | 1050 | 1000 | 1000 | 947 | 970 | 918 | 1050 | 1000 |
| Memory Clock | 6000 | 5000 | 6000 | 5000 | 5700 | 5500 | 500 | 500 |
| Memory Bus (bits) | 512 | 512 | 512 | 512 | 256 | 256 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Max Bandwidth (GB/s) | 384 | 320 | 384 | 320 | 182.4 | 176 | 512 | 512 |
| Memory Size (MB) | 8192 | 4096 | 8192 | 4096 | 4096 | 2048 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Transistors (mn) | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 5000 | 5000 | 8900 | 8900 |
| TDP (watts) | 275 | 290 | 275 | 275 | 190 | 190 | 275 | 275 |
Sapphire are releasing two versions of the Tri-X Radeon R9 Fury – a standard edition with the core clock at 1,000mhz and a limited edition OC model with the BIOS set at 1,040mhz. We look at the OC model today in this review.
The R9 Fury GPU is built on the 28nm process and is equipped with 64 ROPS, 224 texture units and 3,584 shaders. The more expensive Fury X has 64 ROPS, 256 Texture units and 4,096 shaders. They both have 4GB of HBM (Hynix) memory across a super wide 4096 bit memory interface. Bandwidth rating for both cards is 512 GB/s.
I have spent the last couple of weeks testing all our Nvidia and AMD hardware with Catalyst 15.6 beta and Forceware 353.30 drivers. A couple of days before this Fury launch AMD emailed me to say that their latest Catalyst 15.7 beta driver was available.
Subsequently I haven't had time to test all AMD hardware with this driver, however I did make time before launch to test Fury and Fury X with the latest Catalyst 15.7 beta.
