Introduction
There have been a few titanic battles throughout time, Call of Duty and Battlefield, Xbox and PlayStation, World of Warcraft and everybody, but no more a battle than the fundamentals, CPU and GPU. AMD have a strong following for both CPU and GPU, and although they look to be a little behind Intel on the CPU front, they have something that Intel will probably never have, a high end GPU that draws the attention of the tech industry, gamers and fanboys alike.
If you are reading this, the chances are you know that AMD are not alone in the high end GPU market, Nvidia keep them pretty honest most of the time. Of late, Nvidia seem to have the upper hand if you have deep pockets, and AMD are the people’s choice. Just an opinion, but you get more bang for your buck with an AMD card than you do if you spend the same amount on an Nvidia card.
It is application and game dependent, and of course we have Mantel, which caused enough of a stir in the industry to push some companies to ignite the political machines and start the finger pointing and debunking.
Recently AMD released the R9 300 series of cards, we tested the XFX Radeon R9 390X 8GB DD Black Edition and although it’s an impressive card, we felt it didn’t justify the upgrade from a decent R9 290X, unless it was to fulfil a particular circumstance.
So what’s this Fury X all about? If you watched the AMD R9 300 Series release broadcast, you may have picked up a certain amount of enthusiasm from the AMD presenters. Yeah you could say it was all an act, presentations always are, right? This was a little different, they genuinely seemed excited about what they are dong with their GPU range, and it rubbed off.
AMD are trying something different with the Fury X and the internet is a storm of interest about it just now. We have a lot of graphics cards in the office just now, but we have put them aside for the XFX Radeon R9 Fury X, we need to see this for ourselves.
Specification
| AMD Radeon R9 Fury X | AMD Radeon R9 390X | AMD Radeon R9 290X | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stream Processors | 4096 | 2816 | 2816 |
| Core Clock | 1050MHz | 1050MHz | 1000MHz |
| Texture Units | 256 | 176 | 176 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 |
| Video RAM | 4GB HBM | 8GB GDDR5 | 4GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 1GHz | 6GHz | 5GHz |
| Memory Bus Width | 4096-bit HBM | 512-bit | 512-bit |
| Transistor Count | 8.9B | 6.2B | 6.2B |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm |
| GPU | Fiji | Hawaii | Hawaii |
| Launch Date | 24/06/15 | 18/06/15 | 24/10/13 |
- High-Bandwidth Memory with more than 3x the bandwidth per watt over GDDR5 along with a 4096-bit memory interface – the highest AMD GPU memory bandwidth ever.
- Sleek industrial styling including GPU Tach activity indicator and LED illumination all in a compact 7.5-inch card that’s all about raw graphics power.
- Powerful performance, bleeding-edge technology, liquid-cooled, whisper-quiet and future-ready for extreme 4K and VR gaming.
There is a lot to this release, on die memory, reduced PCB size, lower latency memory bandwidth and a third party liquid cooler AIO solution, which manufactures must use.
Product Shots
The box is really big, we have put the XFX’s little brother next to it, the R9 390X, and there is a sizeable difference. Open up the box and you will see the Fury X card and AIO cooler packed in good quality foam packaging.
Not much is shipped with the card, unfortunate for a flagship card, and curiously, a VGA to DVI connector was included, despite the card having neither of these connections.
XFX AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Graphics Card Review
Package and Bundle - 8.5
Performance - 8.5
Price - 8
Consumer Experience - 8.5
8.4
At around £550 in the UK we expected a whole lot more though. Maybe we are easily disappointed or expected too much, and the fact that our sample may have been from the B grade of stock doesn't help, but it also worries us. That's a lot of money, and if you received it in a similar condition as we did, you would send it back.