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AMD Radeon Fury X review thread

Rafterman

Banned
A reference 980 Ti? You could, but the problem is those cards have a pretty poor fan/cooler on them, so you would end up with a very noisey and hot card, which would be too much for most people.

Nvidia cards have excellent reference cooling, it's AMD that usually has poor designs. But even so, the ACX coolers that companies like EVGA use are quieter and cooler when overclocked than the blower design is at stock and they are the same price. You can easily overclock these cards without them being noisy or hot.
 

Crisium

Member
Bad news is all aftermarket 980 Ti's are out of stock or overpriced. There is an Evga for $650, but out of stock.

980 Ti and Titan X reference coolers are definitely not quite up to 700 series quality. They are not as bad as reference 290 or even 7970, but I'd still not bite unless you had to game right now.
 

Octavia

Unconfirmed Member
Difficulty connecting with DP - two of the ports don't work at all. If the main DP port connects at all at 3880x1440 @ 60Hz then it'll start off ok... and then start flickering and blanking out - like I've overclocked the card way too much

Except I'm just sitting on desktop at stock G1 speeds. The rest of the ports are fine - but obviously can't do that res at that refresh. Monitor doesn't do HDMI 2.0 either.

Ah, I see. I've been having issues with my DP on my G1 970, but not quite the same. After troubleshoot googling, seems like DP is just kinda crappy in general on nvidia with connection issues =/
 
Well, it is smaller, quieter and stays cooler. Aside from that not really, but things may still improve with drivers.

As I said much earlier in the thread, it already competes pretty well in noise, temperature, and FPS at 4k.

If they lower the price a bit and fix the frametime variance in software (if that is possible) it could be a valid choice for 4k gaming. Both of these really need to happen though before I'd suggest it to anyone (unless someone really needs this particular form factor).
Alright, so it won't likely catch up in terms of raw power... and we don't know if it can catch up in terms of smoothness and value.
Smoothness is especially important if AMD wants to pair this card with FreeSync monitors, and it's equally important to me because I am very sensitive to framerate unconsistencies.

I even notice the uneven framerate in Mario Kart.

And I really want to give AMD my money. The only thing I ask for is framerate consistency and a wide range 144Hz Freesync 3440x1440 monitor to go with it. I almost don't care if I have to pay the same price as a 980Ti for slightly less performance.
 
Here's a fun review, the Gigabyte G1 Gaming 980 Ti reviewed AFTER the launch of Fury X by Hexus. So it's an example of a Fury X going against a factory overclocked 980 Ti.

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/84284-gigabyte-geforce-gtx-980-ti-g1-gaming-6gb/

The Fury X gets humiliated by an overclocked 980 Ti. It's actually really ugly to witness how badly the Fury X fares against a card which comes from the factory running at the clock speeds the G1 Gaming has.

6d29fd03-39ae-4f94-b5d2-aec255d2aa8f.png

I actually looked at the graph thinking the Fury X was 2nd. Then i lol'd.

Anyway, has AMD said anything about unlocking voltage? I don't understand how they can say that the card is an overclocking beast and things starts fucking crashing after 80MHz....
 

Sinistral

Member
Just like when the TitanX was released, it takes a few weeks for voltage tools to come out once they get a card as they're not developed by AMD/Nvidia. Warranties/Legal issues I guess? MSI Afterburner's dev, according to OCUK forums said they got the FuryX last week. Edit: Which I do think was stupid.

The OC tools for the 980TI worked right away because of the work on the TitanX.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Just like when the TitanX was released, it takes a few weeks for voltage tools to come out once they get a card as they're not developed by AMD/Nvidia. Warranties/Legal issues I guess? MSI Afterburner's dev, according to OCUK forums said they got the FuryX last week.

The OC tools for the 980TI worked right away because of the work on the TitanX.

Do you see much headroom if the VRMs are already hitting 100c? It doesn't feel as likely compared to the reveal event where they were shouting about 50c under load and huge overclocking headroom.
 

Sinistral

Member
I honestly don't know and wouldn't want to venture a guess, does look questionable. These cards are out of my price range at this time. I'm more interested in the $550 Fury (non-x) and what the 3rd party AIB's can come up with. Stop-Gap generation. But VR is between now and 16/14nm. Some attractive ultrawide 3440x1440 Variable Refresh Rate monitors are close too that I'd rather put money into.
 

TAJ

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
4GB is already a joke. I'd be a little hesitant to upgrade to a card with only 6GB, TBH.
 
Both HBM2, TSMC and GloFo 16nm process are expecting to ramp up mass production for 2H 2016. So unless Pascal is radically changed, nVidia is stuck behind this as much as AMD. Last time I read anyway.

From what I understand the AMD equivalent, Arctic Isles (4xx) series will be based on a new microarchitecture (GCN 2.0) also at 14/16nm and with HBM2. When those launch in relation to Nvidia other is anyones guess. Though typically AMD launches first on node shrinks (used to, this long ass 28nm period has changed a lot of things).

Good question. GCN has held up relatively well considering its age. I'm not sure if they will go for something entirely new, but they could do a revision to fix current bottlenecks and whatnot. Maybe it'll be something like what Maxwell is, which wasn't as big of a change as what Kepler was to Fermi.

Pascal could be similar. A new node, that NvLink thingy and HBM are already a lot of big changes. Adding another architecture overhaul would add even more risk.

Thanks for all the great reply's guys! It seems maybe I was a little optimistic on my timeline for nVidia launching their next GPUs, so I guess that makes the launch of the Fury X a little more logical! Does that mean we are going to be stuck with the current crop of cards until possibly Q2 2016?
 
Do you see much headroom if the VRMs are already hitting 100c? It doesn't feel as likely compared to the reveal event where they were shouting about 50c under load and huge overclocking headroom.

Do we know for sure that the VRMs are reaching 100C? Is that why the cards have water cooling by default?
 
Thanks for all the great reply's guys! It seems maybe I was a little optimistic on my timeline for nVidia launching their next GPUs, so I guess that makes the launch of the Fury X a little more logical! Does that mean we are going to be stuck with the current crop of cards until possibly Q2 2016?

That is probably the safest assumption. At best we'll see a 750 Ti-esque card from Nvidia or AMD around Q1 2016, but it's doubtful.


Do we know for sure that the VRMs are reaching 100C? Is that why the cards have water cooling by default?

It's an educated guess based on some heatmaps a couple of sites have shown. That said, VRMs reaching 100C doesn't mean the Fury X needs water cooling. It just means the VRMs don't have sufficient cooling. Usually on some of the better custom solutions they average ~70C.
 
Going on of a tangent here. Can someone answer me this:

Since 2 years ago to the present what is the "target" API most PC games are shipping with? What level of OpenGL or Direct X?
 

tuxfool

Banned
Going on of a tangent here. Can someone answer me this:

Since 2 years ago to the present what is the "target" API most PC games are shipping with? What level of OpenGL or Direct X?

All PC games that started development 2 years ago should be targeting Dx11 and Ogl 4. There are exceptions such as Deus Ex:MD offering DirectX 12 support (comes out early next year), however it should also support dx11.
 

Crisium

Member
Apparently some British site overclocked the memory on Fury X.

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/615...-flag-ship-graphics-card-overclocking-results

95Mhz extra on the GPU and 100MHz extra on the memory. That's a 20% memory overclock considering HMB1 runs so low, so that's actually huge.

14098 -> 16963 on 3dmark

20% performance increase. This is much more than we saw on anyone who just did an OC on the GPU. Fury X does indeed crave more bandwidth despite having the most of any single GPU ever, at least for 3dmark. If we get a consistent way to overclock memory, plus a vcore unlock to overclock the GPU more, we could see something more competitive with the 980 Ti.
 

tuxfool

Banned
Apparently some British site overclocked the memory on Fury X.

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/615...-flag-ship-graphics-card-overclocking-results

95Mhz extra on the GPU and 100MHz extra on the memory. That's a 20% memory overclock considering HMB1 runs so low, so that's actually huge.

14098 -> 16963 on 3dmark

20% performance increase. This is much more than we saw on anyone who just did an OC on the GPU. Fury X does indeed crave more bandwidth despite having the most of any single GPU ever, at least for 3dmark. If we get a consistent way to overclock memory, plus a vcore unlock to overclock the GPU more, we could see something more competitive with the 980 Ti.

I wish they had done the overclocks seperately too, in order to isolate whether memory bandwidth was contributing to the score significantly (seems weird).
 

Herne

Member
Planning on choosing between the air-cooled Fury and a Nano soon, there's absolutely no chance that my Corsair CX500 is going to be enough to run the Fury, is it?

Really looking forward to seeing what Nano brings.
 

finalflame

Gold Member
So, at $649 and similar to worse performance than a 980 Ti, what's the compelling reason to get this card over a 980 Ti?
 

finalflame

Gold Member
Only if you really need the form factor at this point.

Are there cases out there that would not fit a full-sized GPU, but would fit this card and what looks like a 120mmX~40mm radiator with a 25mm fan? My only experience was with mITX cases and all of those seem to support a full-size GPU.

I am just confused, because I was expecting AMD to either come out with something that blows away the 980 Ti by at least a consistent 20% at the same price, or price their card more competitively. Like it or not, they are the underdog right now and the FuryX does not seem compelling at the current performance/price.
 
Are there cases out there that would not fit a full-sized GPU, but would fit this card and what looks like a 120mmX~40mm radiator with a 25mm fan? My only experience was with mITX cases and all of those seem to support a full-size GPU.

I am just confused, because I was expecting AMD to either come out with something that blows away the 980 Ti by at least a consistent 20% at the same price, or price their card more competitively. Like it or not, they are the underdog right now and the FuryX does not seem compelling at the current performance/price.

Yeah TBH, I think the real mistake with Fury X was pricing it at the same $650 as the 980 Ti. It's obviously not a bad product but it's just not as fast, if they had priced it at $550 they could have rendered the OG 980 completely superfluous. Really I don't even know what the point of the watercooling AIO on Fury X is, it's not as if it overclocks by 500mhz and crushes the Titan X.

They still have a chance to go after the 980 by pricing the aircooled Fury at $450 or $500 and the 970 by pricing the Fury Nano at $300, let's see if they are smarter about pricing with the cut-down Fury X products.
 

badb0y

Member
Do you see much headroom if the VRMs are already hitting 100c? It doesn't feel as likely compared to the reveal event where they were shouting about 50c under load and huge overclocking headroom.
Do you have source on this? I watched OC3D's review and he took off the heat shroud and the VRM receives active cooling by the cooler via a copper heat pipe making direct contact over the VRMs.
 

Impulsor

Member
A reference 980 Ti? You could, but the problem is those cards have a pretty poor fan/cooler on them, so you would end up with a very noisey and hot card, which would be too much for most people.

Despite the claims of some above, the Fury X is much quieter than a reference 980 Ti.

I have a reference 980 ti, not even at full load and max temp does it make a lot of noise.

It stops at 83 ºC and manages fan speed to stay at that temp. I come from an older computer with a GTX 580 stock and that was noisier in my experience.
 
Here's a fun review, the Gigabyte G1 Gaming 980 Ti reviewed AFTER the launch of Fury X by Hexus. So it's an example of a Fury X going against a factory overclocked 980 Ti.

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/84284-gigabyte-geforce-gtx-980-ti-g1-gaming-6gb/

The Fury X gets humiliated by an overclocked 980 Ti. It's actually really ugly to witness how badly the Fury X fares against a card which comes from the factory running at the clock speeds the G1 Gaming has.

6d29fd03-39ae-4f94-b5d2-aec255d2aa8f.png

Wow, the Titan X is getting HUMILIATED by an overclocked 980 Ti. nVidia must be SO EMBARRASSED right now!
 
Wow, the Titan X is getting HUMILIATED by an overclocked 980 Ti. nVidia must be SO EMBARRASSED right now!

I threw my TItan X out the window when I saw that graph, then remembered that I can overclock it and beat the G1. Then I got upset again!

Darn these graphs!
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Do you have source on this? I watched OC3D's review and he took off the heat shroud and the VRM receives active cooling by the cooler via a copper heat pipe making direct contact over the VRMs.

It was mentioned a few pages ago

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/937-8/temperatures-nuisances-sonores.html

IMG0047700.png


Check the temperature section. They say the VRM reaches 100 C. That's going to seriously inhibit any overclocking most likely (at least when adding volts).



PC Games Hardware had a similar finding:
Fiji_Cooler_Master_Heat_Full_Load_380Watt-pcgh.jpg


I think this could be rather easily alleviated though. The cooler can clearly handle more heat, but they need to transport it off the VRMs better.
 
Apparently some British site overclocked the memory on Fury X.

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/615...-flag-ship-graphics-card-overclocking-results

95Mhz extra on the GPU and 100MHz extra on the memory. That's a 20% memory overclock considering HMB1 runs so low, so that's actually huge.

14098 -> 16963 on 3dmark

20% performance increase. This is much more than we saw on anyone who just did an OC on the GPU. Fury X does indeed crave more bandwidth despite having the most of any single GPU ever, at least for 3dmark. If we get a consistent way to overclock memory, plus a vcore unlock to overclock the GPU more, we could see something more competitive with the 980 Ti.
How reliable is this website ?
Hardware Info said:
To put the above result in to perspective we managed an overclocked score in 3D Mark on our Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti of 19359 points.
Hum.
The link on the website is not working.

EDIT :
Hardware Info said:
In the tables below you can find the results on The Witcher 3, a game that we only just recently added to our benchmark suite. een game die we zeer recent aan onze set hebben toegevoegd. In Ultra HD resolution the GTX 980Ti and the Fury X are equally fast.
...lol. I won't rate it highly.
 
They definitely need to redesign the heat extractor in the VRM area.

it will probably be a while before we see vendors come out with their own coolers if that's even possible. It would definitely be interesting to see how the card performs and overclocks with voltage control and a full waterblock like this one:

 

Engell

Member
The other consideration is Free Sync. They are cheaper than G Sync displays. MG279Q is $200 cheaper than the XB270HU.

but also consider that g-sync is still a superior tech, but freesync is a very nice "free" alternative that works in most cases.
 

Sh1ner

Member
but also consider that g-sync is still a superior tech, but freesync is a very nice "free" alternative that works in most cases.

As an owner with an ATI r9 290 and a freesync 1440p monitor. The biggest problem is finding something that can drive it with a 1 GPU solution.

I want to upgrade but from everything I am reading seems like the fury or the 390 doesn't bring support for dx 12.1:
CA2AIhD.jpg

Or a substantial framerate gain under price/performance for me to jump on board. Drivers and OC tools may change the last issue. If I am dropping £500 on a fury x I do want it to last.

I guess an upgrade from an r9 290 is not worthwhile until the next revision, most likely GCN 1.3 so I guess a wait of 6 months to a year from now.
 

tuxfool

Banned
I guess an upgrade from an r9 290 is not worthwhile until the next revision, most likely GCN 1.3 so I guess a wait of 6 months to a year from now.

You're going to be waiting about a year for a GCN 2.0 gpu unless amd decides to eschew HBM2 for their high end non-halo products.
 

Sh1ner

Member
You're going to be waiting about a year for a GCN 2.0 gpu unless amd decides to eschew HBM2 for their high end non-halo products.

I assume dx12.1 is going to be pretty nifty. If they can do a minor GCN revision for that I would be sooo happy. I will be honest I won't wait a year for GCN 1.3 or 2.0

I just need more info to know what kind of performance impact dx12.1 brings. If very little then I am fretting over nothing.
 

Van Owen

Banned
As an owner with an ATI r9 290 and a freesync 1440p monitor. The biggest problem is finding something that can drive it with a 1 GPU solution.

I want to upgrade but from everything I am reading seems like the fury or the 390 doesn't bring support for dx 12.1:
CA2AIhD.jpg

Or a substantial framerate gain under price/performance for me to jump on board. Drivers and OC tools may change the last issue. If I am dropping £500 on a fury x I do want it to last.

I guess an upgrade from an r9 290 is not worthwhile until the next revision, most likely GCN 1.3 so I guess a wait of 6 months to a year from now.

There is no DX12.1. There's DX12_1. It's a feature level, not a point update and it's largely irrelevant.
 

tuxfool

Banned
I assume dx12.1 is going to be pretty nifty. If they can do a minor GCN revision for that I would be sooo happy. I will be honest I won't wait a year for GCN 1.3 or 2.0

I just need more info to know what kind of performance impact dx12.1 brings. If very little then I am fretting over nothing.

I doubt that a lot of (any?) games in the intervening year will take advantage of 12_1 features. So I'd say you're fretting over nothing. There will be a few games with dx 12 support however, but with your card you're ok.
 

tuxfool

Banned

NeOak

Member
Are there cases out there that would not fit a full-sized GPU, but would fit this card and what looks like a 120mmX~40mm radiator with a 25mm fan? My only experience was with mITX cases and all of those seem to support a full-size GPU.
I guess you weren't around when Mini-ITX meant using Via C3 CPUs.
 
Really I don't even know what the point of the watercooling AIO on Fury X is, it's not as if it overclocks by 500mhz and crushes the Titan X.

Awesome form factor, really. I mean for mITX low noise builds this is perfect; smaller and quieter (in theory, by dropping the extra fan) vs. the no longer for sale (that I can see) 980 Hybrids. I would totally consider this for a future mITX build (especially with something flexible like the Corsair 250d) but at $800 CDN it's just completely untenable.

EDIT: ugh, not even $800. Probably a grand with tax

But yeah, more comprehensive OC support or a price cut is what it really needed for enthusiast acceptance; it's too expensive for cheaper builds and too impractical for multicard builds, so it's either small or OC (or both, if you're daring)
 

finalflame

Gold Member
I guess you weren't around when Mini-ITX meant using Via C3 CPUs.

I remember Shuttle PCs just fine. That's just not the current state of affairs, and this card is out now, when many/most mITX cases fit a full-sized GPU. I am just wondering if there are cases where there are actually form factor restrictions that do not allow for the use of a full sized GPU, but do have enough room to mount a smaller card with a 120x40mm radiator+25mm fan.
 
I remember Shuttle PCs just fine. That's just not the current state of affairs, and this card is out now, when many/most mITX cases fit a full-sized GPU. I am just wondering if there are cases where there are actually form factor restrictions that do not allow for the use of a full sized GPU, but do have enough room to mount a smaller card with a 120x40mm radiator+25mm fan.

Most modern mITX will support a "full" size GPU (ie: Reference 980). But there are weaknesses and outliers.

Sound: Stuff like the Fractal are built like the Shuttle XPC (which I still own! Cool idea at the time...) Clearance is tight for a full size card, but the bigger problem is exhaust - if your GPU spins up it comes out the side door grille like a speaker. Something like the Fury X or Hybrid 980 will keep very stable temps and minimize noise.

Space: Clearance can be tight sometimes. More legroom in the case means more air volume and generally easier/cleaner builds with less case fan obstruction.
 
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