The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS (2024)

by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM EST

• Posted in
• GPUs
• AMD
• Radeon
• Sapphire
• Radeon 300
• HBM
• Fiji

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288 Comments

Overclocking

Finally, no review of a high-end video card would be complete without a look at overclocking performance.

As was the case with the R9 Fury X two weeks ago, overclockers looking at out of the box overclocking performance are going to come away disappointed with the R9 Fury cards. While cooling and power delivery are overbuilt on both the Asus and Sapphire cards, the R9 Fury is still very restricted when it comes to overclocking. There is no voltage control at this time (even unofficial) and the card’s voltage profile has been finely tuned to avoid needing to supply the card with more voltage than is necessary. As a result the card has relatively little overclocking potential without voltage adjustments.

Neither R9 Fury card is able to overclock as well as our R9 Fury X, indicating that these are likely lower quality (or lower headroom) chips. Ultimately we’re able to get another 75MHz out of the ASUS, for 1075MHz, and another 60MHz out of the Sapphire, for 1100MHz.

Meanwhile with unofficial memory overclocking support now attainable via MSI Afterburner, we’ve also tried our hand at memory overclocking. There’s not a ton of headroom here before artifacting sets in, but we were able to get another 10% (50MHz) out of both R9 Fury cards.

Using our highest clocking card as a reference point, the Sapphire card, the actual performance gains are in the 7-10% range, with an average right up the middle at 8% over a reference clocked R9 Fury. This is actually a bit better than the R9 Fury X and its 5% performance gains, however it’s still not going to provide a huge difference in performance. We’d need to be able to overclock to better than 1100MHz to see any major overclocking gains on the R9 Fury cards.

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• Shadow7037932 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

  Yes! Been waiting for this review for a while.

• Drumsticks - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

  Indeed! Good that it came out so early too :D

  I'm curious @anandtech in general, given the likely newer state of the city/X's drivers, do you think that the performance deltas between each fury card and the respective nvidia will swing further or into AMD's favor as they solidify their drivers?

• Samus - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

  So basically if you have $500 to spend on a video card, get the Fury, if you have $600, get the 980 Ti. Unless you want something liquid cooled/quiet, then the Fury X could be an attractive albeit slower option.

  Driver optimizations will only make the Fury better in the long run as well, since the 980Ti (Maxwell 2) drivers are already well optimized as it is a pretty mature architecture.

  I find it astonishing you can hack off 15% of a cards resources and only lose 6% performance. AMD clearly has a very good (but power hungry) architecture here.

• witeken - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

  No, not at all. You must look at it the other way around: Fury X has 15% more resources, but is <<15% faster.

• 0razor1 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

  Smart , you :) :D This thing is clearly not balanced. That's all there is to it. I'd say x for the WC at 100$ more make prime logic.

• thomascheng - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link

  Balance is not very conclusive. There are games that take advantage of the higher resources and blows past the 980Ti and there are games that don't and therefore slower. Most likely due to developers not having access to Fury and it's resources before. I would say, no games uses that many shading units and you won't see a benefit until games do. The same with HBM.

• FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

  What a pathetic excuse, apologists for amd are so sad.

  AMD got it wrong, and the proof is already evident.

  No, NONE OF US can expect anandtech to be honest about that, nor it's myriad of amd fanboys,
  but we can all be absolutely certain that if it was nVidia whom had done it, a full 2 pages would be dedicated to their massive mistake.

  I've seen it a dozen times here over ten years.

  When will you excuse lie artists ever face reality and stop insulting everyone else with AMD marketing wet dreams coming out of your keyboards ?
  Will you ever ?

• redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link

  And you are not an nividia fanboy are you? Hypocrite.

• redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link

  Typical fanboy, ignore the points and go straight to name calling. No, you are the one people shold be sad about, delusional that they are not a fanboy when they are.

• redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link

  Proof that intel and nvidia wackos are the worst type of people, arrogant, snide, insulting, childish. You are the poster boy for an intel/nvidia sophom*oric fanboy.