Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC+ 4GB Review

My opinion of the Fury hardware has held steady since July 2015 – AMD's move to a new high bandwidth architecture has to be applauded and there are definitely benefits to be seen when gaming at Ultra HD 4K. Driver development has helped improve performance since we first looked at the hardware six months ago.

The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC competes head to head with the overclocked Asus R9 Strix GTX980 (non ti model). In most cases the Nitro R9 Fury is the faster card – especially at Ultra HD 4k, when the HBM architecture gains the advantage. When manually overclocked to 1,128mhz, the Fury card won the majority of the tests today.

As we would expect from AMD's biggest GPU partner, Sapphire have nailed the cooler design on the Nitro R9 Fury OC. The fans spin slowly and produce low noise emissions, even under extended gaming load conditions. The card exhibited no coil whine and overall running temperatures are good, thanks in part to the excellent backplate fitted to the PCB.

As I said in our initial review last year Fury pricing was my main concern, and retail prices today are still a little high. That said, we have been informed by Sapphire that prices of these cards will drop soon, and the Nitro R9 Fury OC will be available in the UK for around the £430 mark in coming weeks.

As it stands, the Nitro R9 Fury OC is priced at £455 inc vat on Overclockers UK and Scan – two of the most popular technology etailers with the KitGuru audience. If Sapphire manage to get the price down to £430 inc vat then the Fury (non X) will impose its presence against the top specified customised GTX980 solutions from key Nvidia partners. Many of the high level GTX980 cards are priced around £440-£450 – based on this Overclockers UK price list today (HERE).

Buy the Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC with backplate from Overclockers UK HERE.

Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.

Pros:

• very quiet under load.
• no coil whine.
• overclocks well.
• backplate helps remove hot spots.
• good Ultra HD 4K performance.
• some extra core headroom available.

Cons:

• waiting on a price drop, which is imminent.
• memory overclocking is still problematic.

Kitguru says: The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC is a fantastic graphics card capable of outperforming the highest grade GTX980 cards.

Become a Patron!