AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card review: AMD's answer to the GTX 980 Ti - hunteredwasind

AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X kicks ass.

It's important to distinction that right up advanced, because AMD's graphics segmentation has had a rough year or so. The society's been forced to watch Nvidia release non one, non two, but five new GeForce graphics cards—the stallion GTX 900-series line—since the Radeon R9 285 launched last September. What's Sir Thomas More, those GeForce cards delivered so much performance and sipped so little power that all AMD could exercise in response was steeply welt prices of its Radeon R200-series graphics cards to stay competitive. And AMD's "unused" Radeon R300-series cards are basically just tweaked versions of the R200-serial GPUs with more memory.

Through IT all, the promise of the cool Radeon R9 Fury X glimmered as the light at the end of the burrow, first through unconfirmed leaks and then through official reveals. It'll have lancinating-edge high-bandwidth memory! Information technology'll have a new Fiji graphics processor with an insane 4,096 stream processors! It'll have an integrated closed-loop pee tank! It'll play 4K games and ecstasy toe-to-toe with Nvidia's inhumane Titan X and GTX 980 Ti!

And it's each true. Every last bit of it. The Radeon R9 Fury X kicks ass.

It's not rather the take the air-off home hunt that Squad Red enthusiasts were hoping for, however—and AMD's claim that the Fury X is "an overclocker's dream" unquestionably does not pass muster.

Let's pitch in.

AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X under the hood

A plot of AMD's HBM implementation.

There isn't practically mystery to the Fury X's branch of knowledge specifications at this period. AMD long since provided a deep-dive into the card's HBM implementation and represented the Delirium X's technical and design details with loving exactness just last week. We'll binding the high points here, merely chequer out our previous coverage if you're looking more details.

The most notable technical aspect of the Fury X is its use of high-bandwidth retentiveness, qualification it the first graphics card to adopt HBM. AMD says it's been developing the technology for seven years, and Nvidia's non expected to squeeze similar technology until 2022 at the earlier, when its Pascal GPUs launch.

HBM lashings DRAM dies one atop the strange, then connects everything with the GPU using "through-silicon vias" and "µbumps" (microbumps). The stacking lets 1GB of HBM consume a large 94-per centum fewer on-board surface area than 1GB of standard GDDR5 memory, which enabled AMD to make the Fury X a stuffed 30-percent shorter than the Radeon R9 290X.

While GDDR5 remembering rocks high clock speeds (up to 7Gbps) and uses a smaller interface to link the GPU—384-bit, or 512-bit in advanced-death graphics cards—HBM takes the antonym glide path. The Fury X's memory is clocked at a bare 1Gbps, but travels over a ridonkulously wide 4,096-bit bus to deliver effective computer storage bandwidth of 512GBps, compared to the GTX 980 Titanium's 336.5GBps. All that memory bandwidth makes for great 4K gaming, though it doesn't give the Fury X a perspicuous edge over the 980 Ti when it comes to games, as we'll see later.

Bailiwick limitations crowned this first-gen HBM at scarcely 4GB of capacity. While AMD CTO Joe Macri told US in May that's all developers really need for now, it by all odds proved to be a problem in our examination when playing games that gobbled up much 4GB of RAM—Grand larceny Automobile V, specifically. Gaming at 4K resolution can eat up memory fast one time you've enabled any sort of anti-aliasing.

AMD's Fiji GPU.

The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X's technological specifications.

Moving recent memory, AMD's new "Fiji" GPU is nothing shortstop of a beast, packed to the gills with a whopping 4,096 stream processors—compared to the R9 290X's 2,816—and 8.9 billion transistors. It's clocked at 1,050MHz, promises 8.6 teraflops of calculate performance, and draws 275 watts of power through 2 8-tholepin power connectors that can straighten up to 375W. Again, our previous coverage has much more info if you're interested.

The Radeon R9 Fury X over the hood

AMD spared zero expense on the physical conception of the Fury X, either. The 7.5-inch circuit board is collective from multiple pieces of die-cast Al, then finished with a non-white nickel gloss on the exoskeleton and soft-tactile sensation black everywhere else. Everything's covered, even the sides and back of the tease. In that location's non even an exhaust lattice connected the I/O plate, which rocks a triplet of full-sized DisplayPorts and an HDMI porthole that's sadly qualified to the HDMI 1.4a specification. The decisionnot to go with HDMI 2.0 limits 4K video output to 30Hz through the HDMI port, so gamers will want to stick to using the DisplayPorts.

See the "GPU Tach" LEDs just above the two 8-pin power connectors?

You'll find an illuminated red Radeon logo on the outward edge and face of the card, along with a new "GPU Tach" (as in "tach") feature film that places 8 small red LEDs higher up the power connections. The harder you push the wit, the more LEDs visible light raised. It's super-silent but aboveboard, it excited me to no end watching those little LEDs flare to living when booting up a game. There's besides a decreased green Light-emitting diode incoming to those that illuminates when AMD's ZeroCore engineering puts the Fury X to sleep. This thing screams "agio."

That extends to the Fury X's cooling system. Rather than going with a typical air-cooling solution, with a fan operating theatre cetacean, the Fury X utilizes an mixed closed-grummet liquid state cooler that's basically a more refined version of the beastly Radeon R9 295×2's water-cooling setup. It's a slick custom design reinforced in conjunctive with Cooler Master, rocking a 120mm fan from Nidec on the radiator. AMD says the cooler itself is rated for capable 500W of thermal capacity.

Deploying water-cooling so keeps the Fury X running nice and cool. Despite AMD's claim that the rooter stays to a higher degree 10 decibels quieter than the Titan X's air-cooled blower, however, I was surprised by sporty how much noise it puts out. Subjectively—as I get into't wealthy person a decibel meter on hand out—the Fury X's radiator fan creates more sound than the sports fan on Nvidia's reference GTX 980 Ti and AMD's own R9 295×2, though I still wouldn't call it loud.

The decorated cables connecting the radiator to the bill of fare itself are a nice touch and far Thomas More esthetically likeable than the R9 295×2's plastic tubes. Be remindful of where you place the discrete radiator/buff combo, however: At 2.5 inches of total breadth (the same every bit the R9 295×2's), they jut far enough into the case of PCWorld's GPU examination machine to bang against our CPU's nonopening-loop liquid cooling.

Final design tone: You North Korean won't make up able to buy aftermarket variants of the Fury X with custom cooling or hefty overclocks practical by add-in board vendors like Asus OR Sapphire. AMD says the Fury X is a reference design only, though the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury scheduled for a July 14 release volition have marketer-customized designs available.

Cover to the next page for overclocking results discussion and performance testing benchmarks.

The elephant in the room

Normally, this is where I'd leap into gaming benchmarks, simply I welcome to talk most a many civilized issue number 1: overclocking.

With big businessman pins capable of sucking down 100W of extra vim, a liquid-cooling solution rated for up to 500W of thermal capacitance, and a redesigned AMD PowerTune/OverDrive that gives you more control over o.k.-tuning your identity card's capabilities, the Radeon R9 Madness X seems tailor-made for hefty overclocking. Heck, AMD level touted the card's overclockability (that's a word, right?) at its E3 unveiling. "You'll represent able to overclock this thing like no tomorrow," AMD CTO Joe Macri aforesaid. "This is an overclocker's dream."

That's… well, that's exactly not true, at least for the review sample I was given.

I was only able to push my Fury X from its 1,050MHz stock log up to 1100MHz, a very modest bump that added a mere 1 to 2 frames per second of operation in gaming benchmarks. You can't touch the HBM's memory clock—AMD bolted it down. And any time I tried upping the Fury X's power limit in AMD's PowerTune utility-grade, even by 1 percent, instability now ensued.

An AMD emblematical told me that "We had a very circumscribed number of OC boards." When I asked whether there will be different variants of the Fury X, conferred this "OC board" talk, I was told that thither will only be one SKU, and it's the regular "silicon drawing" when IT comes to your GPU's overclocking capabilities. (Overclocking capabilities vary from item-by-item GPU to individual GPU; another Wildnes X could have much many clearance than ours, for example.)

Wholly that said, we've heard through the grapevine that we're non the only ones experiencing disappointing overclocks with the Fury X, either. Soh if you're considering picking up a Vehemence X, peruse the following gaming benchmarks knowing that you English hawthorn not be able to eke out extra performance via overclocking.

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X gaming benchmarks

Sufficiency preamble! Have's dive into the nitty-gritty.

As with all of our graphics card reviews, I benchmarked the Radeon R9 Fury X on PCWorld's GPU testing system, which contains:

• Intel's Core i7-5960X with a Corsair Hydro Series H100i compressed-loop water tank, to eliminate any potential for CPU bottlenecks moving graphical benchmarks
• An Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard
• Corsair's Payback LPX DDR4 store, Obsidian 750D full tower cause, and 1200-watt AX1200i office supply
• A 480GB Intel 730 series SSD
• Windows 8.1 Pro

American Samoa Army for the Liberation of Rwanda American Samoa the games go, we ill-used the in-biz benchmarks provided with apiece, utilizing the stock graphics settings mentioned unless otherwise noted. We focused on 4K gaming results for this limited review.

I've compared the Madness X against Nvidia's consultation GeForce 980 Ti, GeForce 980, and the $1000 Giant X, too as AMD's older Radeon R9 290X and the Radeon R9 295×2, which packs two of the "Hawai'i" GPUs found in the R9 290X. I've also enclosed just about benchmarks from a card that we South Korean won't have a formal brushup for until subsequent this week: EVGA's $680 GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+, an aftermarket version of the GTX 980 Ti that sports EVGA's popular ACX 2.0+ dual-buff cooling system.

Spoiler cognisant: EVGA's custom GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ with ACX 2.0+ temperature reduction.

EVGA sent ME the GTX 980 Te South Carolina+ on the same day AMD passed me the Fierceness X—pure happenstance, I'm reliable. We'll dissect it in full detail in our review later this week, but basically, the ACX 2.0 ice chest helps EVGA's model run a full 9 degrees Celsius ice chest than the 980 Si reference design, which in turn let EVGA crank the GPU's nub clock adequate 1,102MHz stand, which boosts to 1,190MHz when needed. The stock GTX 980 Cordyline terminalis packs 1,000MHz base and 1,075MHz advance clocks, for reference.

Spoiler conscious: This EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ is a animal that outpunches both the Fury X and Titan X itself—something EVGA was to be sure aware of when IT sent me the card precisely in metre to coincide with the Fury X launch.

Simply remember: Flatbottomed if the EVGA card is more beastly, the Fury X still kicks can.

Housekeeping notes:You can click on any graph in that clause to enlarge it. Note that entirely 4K results are enrolled Here due to time constraints, but I can drop 2560×1440 resolution benchmarks for the Eumenides X in the comments if anybody's interested. (With the exception ofSleeping Dogs,Dragon Age, andGTA V on ultra settings—all of which hover in the 40 to 50 fps range—the Fury X clears 70 fps in every other tested play benchmark at that resolution.)

Lashkar-e-Tayyiba's kick things off with Midsection-earth: Shadow of Mordor. This bang-up teeny-weeny game gobbled down tons of manufacture awards and, Thomas More importantly for our purpose, offers an optional Immoderate HD textures pack that is only advisable for cards with 6GB or much of onboard memory. That doesn't hinder the Violence X's ability to come out rhythmic with slimly higher frame rates than the reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti—nary small feat, especially when the game opens with a squish paginate championing Nvidia technology.

The game was tested at Medium and High superior graphics presets, then by using the Ultra HD Texture pack and manually cranking all graphics option to its highest available setting, which Trace of Mordor's Radical setting doesn't actually do. The R9 295×2 consistently crashes every time I attempt to change Mordor's resolution Beaver State graphics settings, hence the set scores. (Ah, the joys of multi-GPU setups.)

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition absolutely murders graphics cards when the graphics settings are set to Extreme at high resolutions. Only the dual-GPU Radeon R9 295×2 hits 30 fps at 4K resolution, though the Fury X hangs with its Nvidia counterparts.

The Fury X also hangs tight with the reference GTX 980 Cordyline terminalis in Metro Lastly Light Redux, which we trial run with PhysX and the frame rate-killing SSAA options disabled. EVGA's edition of the GTX 980 Titanium trumps all single-GPU comers, though the three-fold-GPU Radeon R9 295×2 fires connected altogether cylinders in this title.

Once again, the Fury X and book of fact 980 Cordyline terminalis are neck and neck in Alien Isolation, a crippled that scales well across all hardware types and waterfall low AMD's Gaming Evolved stain.

The gorgeous Dragon Age: Inquisition also partnered with AMD at its launch, but Nvidia's cards maintain a clear direct Hera. Note that the R9 295×2 apparently doesn't have a working CrossFire profile for the plot, so it drops down to using a single GPU.

The same goes for Sniper Elite 3. Note that we didn't have a adventure to test the reference GTX 980 Si present.

We also tested the Fury X and EVGA's 980 Ti Superclocked+ in Grand larceny Machine V, because the game is notorious for demanding more than 4GB of computer memory—HBM's top electrical capacity—at broad resolutions.

We tested the plot three slipway at 4K resolution. First, by cranking all the sliders and nontextual matter settings to their highest settings, then enabling 4x MSAA and 4X reflections MSAA in range to strike , of RAM usage; then, using the same settings but crippling all MSAA to drop the retentiveness usage to 4,029MB, just under the Fury X's limit point; and so by testing the Fury X's chops at normal graphics settings with MSAA disabled, which consumes 1,985MB of memory. (We didn't make clock to bench mark any other cards, alas.)

The EVGA card pounds the Fury X here—no wonder GTA V wasn't enclosed in the reviewer's pass over benchmarks AMD provided for the Fury X last week. But the build rate averages alone don't show the full experience: When GTA V was pushed to consume more memory than the Fury X has onboard, the see became passing stuttery, sudden, and graphically glitchy equally the placard offloaded duties to system storage, which is far slower than HBM.

That's to embody expected when a gamey's memory use exceeds the aboard capabilities of a artwork card, however, which was a big part of the reason gamers were in such a tizzy over the GTX 970's segmented memory setup in the first place this year, in which the last 0.5GB of the card's 4GB of RAM performs much slower than the rest.

Continue to the next page for the conclusion of our Eumenides X execution testing, and final thoughts about AMD's new flagship.

I also tested the systems using three unreal, just well-respected benchmarking tools: 3DMark's Fire Impinge on and Fire Impress Ultra, as well American Samoa Unigine's Valley. Eastern Samoa AMD promised, the Fury X comes retired ahead of the reference GTX 980 Ti in Fire Strike and Fervour Work stoppage Ultra, beating even the EVGA variant at the old, perhaps due to HBM's upper—though the tables are turned in the Valley results.

To test power and outpouring information, I outpouring the toilsome Furmark benchmark for 15 minutes, fetching temperature information at the final stage using Furmark's inherent tool and double-checking it with SpeedFan. Top executive is measured on a whole-system base, instead of the GPU solo, away plugging the PC into a Watts Up meter rather than the electric receptacl.

As you can see, the Ferocity X may technically need only 275W for what AMD calls "distinctive play scenarios" but it draws often, a great deal more under Furmark's pip-case scenario—nearly arsenic much as two GTX 980s (not Tis) in SLI. It drew even more power than the double-GPU Radeon 295×2.

Happening the supportive side, the Fury X runs extremely cool, hitting 56 degrees Celsius max after different hours of overclocking. In that respect would be plenty of room for overclocking… if the silicon chip itself overclocked valuable a beshrew.

Bottom line

So there you have it: Between the unused Fiji GPU and the inclusion of HBM, AMD's Radeon R9 Wildnes X enters the rarefied air of single-GPU cards capable enough to play games at 4K resolutions with elated graphics detail settings enabled—an exclusive club containing only it, the GTX 980 Ti, and the Titan X. (Equivalent the Behemoth X and 980 Ti, the Fury X struggles to collide with a full 60fps at 4K/high, however, soh if you opt to pick matchless aweigh you should deal picking up a new 4K FreeSync monitor to pop off with it.)

One more time: The Fury X kicks behind! Both technically and aesthetically. AMD needed a hit, and the Fury X is sure to be one with Team Red ink enthusiasts.

That aforementioned, it's hard not to feel a bit disappointed about whatever aspects of the card—though that may have to do more with AMD's bankruptcy to manage expectations for it.

After hearing about HBM's lofty technical numbers for months, it's disappointing to see elflike to nary pure gaming benefits from all that bandwidth. After seeing the tech specs and hearing AMD's Joe Macri wax poetic about the Fury X's overclocking potential, it's majorly disappointing to see IT fail so difficult on it strawma, crappy silicon lottery draw or no. And while 6GB of RAM is still overkill for the vast majority of today's games, it's disappointing to see the Fury X limited to just 4GB of capacity when some of today's games are starting to blow through that at the 4K resolution that AMD's new flagship is designed for, as evidenced by our GTA V results.

The timely arrival of EVGA's usage GTX 980 Ti, which beats both AMD and Nvidia's reference flagships in untreated benchmarks, also takes some of the wrap out of the Fury X's sails—wind that can't be countered away AMD's have ironware partners, because the Fury X is limited to acknowledgment designs alone.

No, the Fury X isn't Titan-killer that Team Red fans hoped it would cost—but it is a GTX 980 Ti equal. This is nothing short of a powerful, thoughtful graphics card that once again puts AMD Radeon on like footingwith Nvidia's gambling finest. Being one of the nearly powerful graphics card game ever created is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when AMD wrapped IT all up in such a lovingly designed software.

AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X kicks ass… flat if it doesn't wee Nvidia's malodorous-end offerings obsolete.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/428220/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-graphics-card-review-amds-thoughtful-4k-powerhouse.html

Posted by: hunteredwasind.blogspot.com

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