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AMD released their R9 Fury back in July 2015, and our review at the time was fairly positive with concerns mainly leveled over the pricing. Today we look at the Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4GB – a new triple fan custom solution featuring enhanced out of the box clock speeds.
Sapphire have earned a reputation for creating some of the finest AMD gaming cards. In their supporting literature they claim the Nitro R9 Fury is ‘The Fastest and Quietest on the market'. Partners are keen to focus on noise levels after well documented concerns over related coil whine problems.
During the write up for this article, Sapphire detailed that the Fury card prices will be getting more competitive. We were told that the Nitro R9 Fury OC will be available shortly at around the £430 mark in the UK. This puts the card into the same price zone as the high end custom Nvidia GTX980's (HERE).
| GPU | R9 390X | R9 290X | R9 390 | R9 290 | R9 380X | R9 380 | R9 285 | Fury X | Fury |
| Launch | June 2015 | Oct 2013 | June 2015 | Nov 2013 | Nov 2015 | June 2015 | Sep 2014 | June 2015 | June 2015 |
| DX Support | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Process (nm) | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Processors | 2816 | 2816 | 2560 | 2560 | 2048 | 1792 | 1792 | 4096 | 3584 |
| Texture Units | 176 | 176 | 160 | 160 | 128 | 112 | 112 | 256 | 224 |
| ROP’s | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 64 | 64 |
| Boost CPU Clock | 1050 | 1000 | 1000 | 947 | 970 | 970 | 918 | 1050 | 1000 |
| Memory Clock | 6000 | 5000 | 6000 | 5000 | 5700 | 5700 | 5500 | 500 | 500 |
| Memory Bus (bits) | 512 | 512 | 512 | 512 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Max Bandwidth (GB/s) | 384 | 320 | 384 | 320 | 182.4 | 182.4 | 176 | 512 | 512 |
| Memory Size (MB) | 8192 | 4096 | 8192 | 4096 | 4096 | 4096 | 2048 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Transistors (mn) | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 5000 | 5000 | 5000 | 8900 | 8900 |
| TDP (watts) | 275 | 290 | 275 | 275 | 190 | 190 | 190 | 275 | 275 |
The AMD 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.
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC 4GB ships in a dark box featuring futuristic robotic artwork.
The rear of the box highlights some of the features of the hardware.
Inside the box is a software disc, sticker, literature on the product and an HDMI cable.
The Nitro cards are very distinctive by design – they are predominately black with silver accenting. It is a fine looking card incorporating three 90mm fans (with aerofoil blades and dual ball bearing hubs) which take up the full length of the PCB underneath. The last Nitro card we reviewed in December 2015 (R9 390 Nitro) had ‘Sapphire' branding on the backplate but this time the company have placed the focus on the ‘Nitro' brand name.
The card is equipped with a dual link DVI-D connector, three DisplayPort 1.2a connectors and a single HDMI 1.4a connector. Sadly, no support for the new HDMI 2.0 standard – which means you can’t get 4K 60hz from this connector. This is something I do depend on myself as I use a 65 inch Sony 4K TV for my gaming (which has only HDMI 2.0 ports).
The card takes power from two eight pin PCIe connectors. It has full bridge less Crossfire support, like the 390 series.
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury adopts an 8 layer 2 oz PCB with a 6 phase power circuit. Sapphire claim this design drops VRM temperature by up to 20%. A diecast mounting frame supports the PCB and cooler assembly and improves rigidity. The cooler shroud mounts to the frame and controls the airflow. The cooler assembly extends past the length of the PCB which helps improve airflow circulation. Sapphire are using their own Black Diamond chokes throughout to improve stability under load.
The cooling system comprises 5 copper heatpipes which measure: 1x 10mm, 2x 8mm and 2 x 6 mm.
We spent the last 10 days retesting all the hardware with the latest drivers. While we did all the testing in this review with the Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC in the faster 1050mhz OC+ BIOS setting we felt it was worthwhile including all the results after manually overclocking the hardware to the limit. Overclocking results are achieved with the BIOS in the higher 300w setting.
We managed to increase the core clock speed to 1,128mhz before instability would occur. Increasing the power limit further didn't reap any reward, this is the limit of our particular sample. A 7.4% increase over the ‘out of the box' speeds is decent, especially considering AMD opted to run the Fury hardware at a fairly high reference core clock speed.
We installed the latest version of Sapphire's TRIXX software tool to try and overclock the memory. The memory slider was indeed unlocked, but overclocking the memory by even 1mhz caused an immediate hard system reboot.
On this page we present some high resolution images of the product taken with a Canon 1DX and Canon 28-70mm F2.8 lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.
Maintaining our performance graphs has been a full time job in the last couple of months – Nvidia and AMD have been hard at work updating their drivers and in this review we test with AMD’s Crimson 16.1 driver and the Nvidia 361.43 WHQL driver. Due to public demand we also add in a range of tests at 1080p to supplement the results at 1440p and Ultra HD 4K resolutions.
Even though it is not close to being finished, we wanted to include some findings from an early access build of the (Windows 10) Direct X 12 capable Ashes of The Singularity by Stardock (website HERE) – this uses the Nitrous game engine. We are confident this is not an indication of how the game will run when it reaches retail at a future date, but still, it is interesting to showcase today. You can buy it from STEAM, over HERE.
If you want to read more about our test system, or are interested in buying the same Kitguru Test Rig, check out our article with links on this page. We are using an Asus PB287Q 4k and Apple 30 inch Cinema HD monitor for this review today.
If you have other suggestions please email me directly at zardon(at)kitguru.net.
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC 4GB (1050mhz core / 500 mhz memory) & (1,128mhz core / 500 mhz memory)
Comparison Cards on test:
Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB (Rev 2 w/ backplate). (1040mhz core / 1500 mhz memory)
Powercolor PCS+ Radeon R9 380X Myst Edition 4GB (1,020 mhz core / 1,475 mhz memory)
Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380X (1,040 mhz core / 1,500 mhz memory)
ASUS Strix R9 380X DirectCU II OC (1,030 mhz core / 1425 mhz memory)
PowerColor Radeon R9 390 PCS+ (1,010 mhz core / 1,500 mhz memory) & (1,150 mhz core / 1,693 mhz memory).
Sapphire R9 295X2 (1,018 mhz core / 1,250mhz memory)
AMD Fury X (1,050 mhz core / 500 mhz memory)
Nvidia GTX Titan Z (706 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)
Nvidia GTX Titan X (1,000 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)
Asus GTX980 Strix (1,178 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)
Nvidia GTX980 Ti (1000 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)
Palit GTX970 (1,051 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)
Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB (1,055 mhz core / 1,500 mhz memory)
Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB (1,010 mhz core / 1,500 mhz memory)
Sapphire R9 380 Nitro 4GB (985 mhz core / 1,450 mhz memory)
Palit GTX960 Super JetStream (1,279 mhz core / 1,800 mhz memory)
Software:
Windows 10 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
Games:
Ashes Of the Singularity DX12 mode (early access build)
Grid AutoSport
Tomb Raider
Grand Theft Auto 5
Metro 2033 Redux
We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.
Game descriptions edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.
3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury scores a couple of hundred points behind the overclocked Asus GTX980 Strix, however when manually overclocked, the score increases ahead of the reference clocked Fury X.
At the Extreme resolution test the Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury is just behind the overclocked Asus GTX980 Strix, by around 200 points. When manually overclocked to 1,128 mhz, it pushes ahead by 200 points.
3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.
Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.
To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.”
At default clock speeds, the Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury is positioned right behind the Fury X. When overclocked, it stretches out a tiny lead at 16,386 points.
When manually overclocked the R9 Fury is batting at the same level as the more expensive Fury X.
Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.
Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:
- Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
- Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
- Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
- Multicore CPU support
- Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
- Powerful C++ API
- Comprehensive performance profiling system
- Flexible XML-based data structures
We test at 2560×1440 with quality setting at ULTRA, Tessellation at NORMAL, and Anti-Aliasing at x2.
Again we can see the performance level follows a similar pattern as before with the Fury being slightly outperformed by the overclocked Asus GTX980 Strix — but when clocked to the limit it manages to trade places.
Grid Autosport (styled as GRID Autosport) is a racing video game by Codemasters and is the sequel to 2008′s Race Driver: Grid and 2013′s Grid 2. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on June 24, 2014. (Wikipedia).
We test at 2560×1440 with 8xMSAA and with the ‘ULTRA' profile enabled.
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC performs well at 1440p averaging over 80 frames per second.Grid Autosport (styled as GRID Autosport) is a racing video game by Codemasters and is the sequel to 2008′s Race Driver: Grid and 2013′s Grid 2. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on June 24, 2014. (Wikipedia).
We test at 3840×2160 with 8xMSAA and with the ‘ULTRA' profile enabled.
At Ultra HD 4K the frame rates are high, although this engine is not too demanding. When manually overclocked, the performance is very close to the more expensive Fury X.
Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. (Wikipedia).
We test at 1080p with the ‘ULTIMATE' image quality profile selected.
Great performance at 1080p, holding a frame rate well above 60 at all times, even before we manually overclock it to breaking point.
Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. (Wikipedia).
We test at 1440p with the ‘ULTIMATE’ image quality profile selected.
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury outperforms the GTX980 at 1440p, even before we manually overclock it to 1,128mhz. At the maximum performance level it is just a couple of frames behind the Fury X.Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. (Wikipedia).
We test at 3840×2160 (4K) with the ‘ULTIMATE’ image profile selected. We normally reduce the image quality profile to ‘ULTRA’ at this resolution, but we decided to keep it at the highest image quality possible.
Ultra HD 4K performance is solid, outperforming the GTX980 Strix by a clear margin. At 1,128mhz the frame rates are not too far behind the AMD Fury X.
Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.
Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.
The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).
We maximised every slider – FXAA was enabled, although we left all other Anti Aliasing settings disabled – based on reader feedback from previous reviews. ‘Ignore Suggested Limits’ was turned ‘ON’.
We found some intensive sections of the Grand Theft Auto 5 world and tested each card multiple times to confirm accuracy. The game demanded around 3.3GB of GPU memory at 1080p.
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury holds an average of over 50 frames per second at all times and is very close in performance to the Fury X, when manually overclocked.
Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.
Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.
The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).
We maximised every slider – FXAA was enabled, although we left all other Anti Aliasing settings disabled – based on reader feedback from previous reviews. ‘Ignore Suggested Limits’ was turned ‘ON’.
We found some intensive sections of the Grand Theft Auto 5 world and tested each card multiple times to confirm accuracy. The game demanded around 3.5GB of GPU memory at 1440p and just over 4GB at 4K.
At 1440p the minimum frame rate holds close to 40 frames per second – fine for a portion of the audience, but unacceptable for the gamers who want a solid 60fps+. A reduction of image quality settings would help rectify this.Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.
Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.
The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).
We maximised every slider – FXAA was enabled, although we left all other Anti Aliasing settings disabled – based on reader feedback from previous reviews. ‘Ignore Suggested Limits’ was turned ‘ON’.
We found some intensive sections of the Grand Theft Auto 5 world and tested each card multiple times to confirm accuracy. The game demanded around 3.5GB of GPU memory at 1440p and just over 4GB at 4K.
At Ultra HD 4K these settings prove too much for any single GPU. Still when overclocked the frame rate holds steady between 30-37 fps which for some people would be enough. A reduction in image quality settings, or adding another card would improve engine performance dramatically at 4k. The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC is faster than the overclocked GTX980 Strix however.
Metro 2033 Redux is a remake of the original game, with enhanced graphics. We often test with Metro Last Light Redux, but decided to mix things around for this review today. We test at 2560×1440 with the following settings: Quality-Very High, SSAA-off, Texture Filtering-16x, Motion Blur-Normal, Tessellation-Normal, Advanced Physx-off.
Very similar performance at 1080p to the GTX980 Strix, averaging between 89 and 93 frames per second.
Metro 2033 Redux is a remake of the original game, with enhanced graphics. We often test with Metro Last Light Redux, but decided to mix things around for this review today. We test at 2560×1440 with the following settings: Quality-Very High, SSAA-off, Texture Filtering-16x, Motion Blur-Normal, Tessellation-Normal, Advanced Physx-off.
At 1440p the Fury averages around 60 frames per second with an increase of 4-5 fps when manually overclocked.
Metro 2033 Redux is a remake of the original game, with enhanced graphics. We often test with Metro Last Light Redux, but decided to mix things around for this review today. We test at 2560×1440 with the following settings: Quality-Very High, SSAA-off, Texture Filtering-16x, Motion Blur-Normal, Tessellation-Normal, Advanced Physx-off.
A tough order at 4k – with frame rates dropping into what we would consider unplayable zones. That said, the R9 Fury manages to outperform the Asus GTX980 Strix. A drop of image quality settings would help raise the minimum frame rates.
Ashes Of The Singularity is still in the early phases of development, although you can buy it from STEAM as an ‘early access' game over HERE. This game has a Direct X 12 mode available, if you are using Windows 10. We don't expect our results today will be indicative of the engine performance when the final game is released in the future, but it is interesting to include as an additional test.
We test at 1080p with the ‘extreme' setting and MSAA disabled.
This is really no indication of how the final Direct X 12 game will run, however we can see the R9 Fury is outperforming the overclocked GTX980 Strix, by a significant margin.
Ashes Of The Singularity is still in the early phases of development, although you can buy it from STEAM as an ‘early access' game over HERE. This game has a Direct X 12 mode available, if you are using Windows 10. We don't expect our results today will be indicative of the engine performance when the final game is released in the future, but it is interesting to include as an additional test.
We test at 3840×2160 with the ‘Crazy' Profile enabled, but with Anti Aliasing disabled.
Very similar results to the Fury X card at 4K.
The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 23c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.
The triple fan cooler performs very well, holding gaming temperatures at 65c under extended load.
We install the graphics card into our system and measure temperatures on the back of the PCB with our Fluke Visual IR Thermometer/Infrared Thermal Camera. This is a real world running environment playing Tomb Raider for extended periods of time.
The image above shows the Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury OC remains relatively cool, thanks to the backplate. Load temperatures rise to give a reading of 65.4C under extended conditions. The backplate helps stop the build up of hot spots on the PCB, exactly what we want to see.
We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.
We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.
KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury is an extremely quiet running graphics card, holding steady close to 33dBa under standard gaming load conditions. The fans on our review sample never rotated faster than 1,200 rpm when playing many of the leading games.
We didn't experience any coil whine issues, even when artificially trying to exacerbate the issue under synthetic conditions (such as when forcing a 400 frame rate situation).
We measure power consumption from the whole system when idle and when gaming, excluding the monitor.
The Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury system consumes 328 watts when fully loaded (at the 1,050mhz core BIOS setting).
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.
