HiGame

At E3 last month, AMD announced that it would bring launch multiple GPUs under its new Fury brand. First up was the Fury X, a $649 card meant to compete with the GTX 980 Ti and sporting its own custom water cooler. Today, the company is launching its follow-up to the Fury X, the $549 Radeon R9 Fury. This new card uses the same base Fiji GPU as the Fury X, but with fewer cores (3584 as opposed to 4096). The modest reduction in total compute units is matched by a slight cut to texture mapping units (down to 226, from 256), but the total number of ROPS stayed the same, at 64. The Radeon Fury’s clock speed has been cut slightly, to 1GHz (down from the Radeon Fury X’s 1050MHz), but the GPU packs the same 500MHz, 4096-bit HBM interface, 275W maximum board power, and dual 8-pin PCIe connectors.



One of the factors that sets the new Radeon R9 Fury apart from the Fury X is the size of the card. While neither the Sapphire Tri-X or Asus Strix R9 Fury are that much bigger than other high-end air-cooled GPUs,*they’re far larger than AMD’s diminutive Radeon Fury X. Granted, that GPU used a water-cooler while the Strix (the card we have in-house) is air-cooled, but it’s not just the cooler that’s large — Asus mounted the Fury on a standard-length high-end PCB as well.



The resulting card is the Asus Strix R9 Fury DirectCU III OC, but don’t let the OC get your hopes up. AMD’s reference card is clocked at 1GHz standard, while the Strix clocks in at a maximum of 1020MHz out of the box. That 2% OC isn’t going to push the envelope, and like the Fury X, Fury isn’t expected to have much overclocking headroom. One thing to like about the R9 Fury Strix, particularly if you have older monitors, is that the GPU supports a wide range of ports. Unlike the Sapphire version of the card, which offers 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI, the Strix packs 3x DisplayPort, 1x DVI-D, and 1x HDMI.



According to Asus, the GPU cooler is designed to maintain a maximum temperature of 85C. That’s not nearly as low as AMD’s 50C target for Fury X, but for an air-cooled card, 85C is quite good. It’s particularly impressive given that AMD’s last high-end air-cooled cards, the R9 290 and R9 290X, often ran right up to their 95C thresholds. Asus is bringing the Strix R9 to market at $579, marginally higher than the $549 AMD is targeting for the R9 Fury in general. The heatsink and attached GPU are huge compared to previous cards, at 11.75 inches long and with significant cooler overhang.



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