XFX Radeon R9 Fury Triple Dissipation Video Card Review
XFX Radeon R9 Fury – Budget Fiji?
What happens when you take the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X video card with the Fiji GPU and disable 512 or 12.5% of the stream processors? You end up with the lower cost AMD Radeon R9 Fury video card that should still perform well on most game titles at the most demanding resolutions. It’s been over seven months since we have looked at any Radeon R9 Fury card and there has been a bunch of new games that have come out since then as well as the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers. We had the opportunity to take a look at the XFX Radeon R9 Fury Graphics Card that is sold under part number R9-Fury-4TF9 and jumped at the chance to take a look at it!
The XFX Radeon R9 Fury 4GB HBM video card is available on Amazon here in the United Sates for $529.99 shipped, which is down slightly from the $549 launch price in the summer of 2015. This Radeon R9 Fury card by XFX features AMD’s reference designed PCB with 1000MHz core clock speeds and 500 MHz clock speeds on the 4GB of HBM1 memory. XFX customized this card by topping it off with the XFX Triple Dissipation GPU cooler The only other Radeon R9 Fury model offered by XFX is a water cooled version for $629.99 shipped. The funny thing is the XFX Radeon R9 Fury X video card is also water cooled and runs $629.99 shipped, so there is absolutely no that anyone in their right mind would buy a water cooled Radeon R9 Fury card when the Radeon R9 Fury X features more cores along with water cooling for the same price!
The XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition is a dual-slot graphics card that fairly long at 12-inches in length with 4.5-inches of that length being the heatsink extending past the end of the cards circuit board. XFX went with a mostly black design for this card, so the PCB, fan shroud and fans are all black.
On the back of the card you’ll notice that XFX went with a backplate that improves the visual appearance of the card when it’s installed, but also helps add rigidity and protects the components that sit under it.
In the shot above you can see two 8-pin PCIe video card power connectors that are needed for operation. XFX includes a dual 6-pin to 8-pin PCIe power adapters for those that don’t have the proper cables available on their power supply. XFX recommends a 750 Watt or greater power supply to properly power this video card.
The Ghost 3.0 Double Dissipation cooling solution features seven copper heatpipes, five extend to the end of the card and are visible. If you look in the image above you can see how XFX is using another passive heatsink to cool the digital power components. XFX says that their XFX Extreme VRM and Memory Cooling helps drop VRM temperatures by up to 30C and GDDR5 temperatures by up to 20C. These lower temperatures help reduce fan noise as well as the card is running coller. XFX is using a 6-phase full digital power design on this card with unlocked voltages, so you have full control over the voltages if you want to use a 3rd party utility to push your card to the limit.
When it comes to video connectors the XFX Radeon R9Fury comes with three DisplayPort 1.2a connectors and one HDMI 1.4 connector when it comes to display options, which is the AMD reference video output configuration. Also notice that this card is thicker than a standard dual-slot design and is considered a 2.2 slot card due to the thick Triple Dissipation GPU cooler.
Here is a quick look at the XFX Radeon R9 Fury X versus the XFX Radeon R9 Fury
XFX Radeon R9 Fury X | XFX Radeon R9 Fury | XFX Radeon R9 Nano | |
GPU Architecture | 28nm Fiji | 28nm Fiji | 28nm Fiji |
Shader Cores | 4096 | 3584 | 4096 |
GPU base clock | 1050MHz | 1000MHz | 1000MHz |
Texture Units | 256 | 224 | 256 |
Texture Fillrate | 268.8 GTexel/s | 233.0 GTexel/s | 256.0 GTexel/s |
ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 |
Pixel Fillrate | 67.2 GP/s | 66.6 GP/s | 64.0 GP/s |
Memory | 4GB HBM1 | 4GB HBM1 | 4GB HBM1 |
Memory clock | 500MHz | 500MHz | 500MHz |
Memory interface | 4096-bit | 4096-bit | 4096-bit |
Memory Bandwidth | 512.0 GB/s | 512.0 GB/s | 512.0 GB/s |
0dB Fanless Idle | No | No | No |
Length | 7.5-inches | 12-inches | 5.98-inches |
Recommended PSU | 750 Watts | 750 Watts | 550 Watts |
Power Connectors | 2 x 8-pin | 2 x 8-pin | 1 x 8-pin |
Street Price | $629.99 shipped | $529.99 shipped | $499.99 shipped |
On to the benchmarks!