AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Video Card Review
AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Overclocking
How well does the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card overclock? We were wondering the same thing and fired up AMD Catalyst Control Center to find out!
AMD allows you to overlock the Radeon R9 Fury X video card with AMD OverDrive like normal, but you can only adjust the GPU clock settings as memory overclocking has been locked down. From what we gather AMD feels that High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is still too new and didn’t want consumers overclocking it just yet. We have a feeling that down the road AMD will again allow memory overclocking, but it obviously won’t be happening right out of the gate. AMD is aware of the desire to overclock and has issued statements like this with regards to overclocking the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X video card.
“We understand that enthusiast customers are always eager to squeeze the full potential out of their graphics card by overclocking. Typically electrical and thermal limitations impede the potential overclocks of a graphics card. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X has been designed with this in mind to minimize electrical and thermal limitations as barriers to enable those customers who want overclock their graphics card at their own discretion.” – AMD
In case you forgot, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X reference card comes clocked at 1050MHz on the core and 500MHz on the 4GB of SKHynix HBM1. Let’s see how much higher we can get those 4096 stream processors!
AMD informed us that a good overclock would be 100MHz, so hitting 1150MHz on the core clock was our goal. Unfortunately our particular card does not appear to be an overclocking friendly model for some reason and we topped out at 1130MHz with a 7.6% GPU clock setting in AMD OverDrive. We played around with the power limit setting, but it made no difference in performance by increasing it to 10% in a couple game titles we spot checked, so we just left it at zero. Every card clocks differently and overclocking performance is not guaranteed, so we will just have to work with what we got!
If we pushed the overclock just 0.1% more we encountered many in-game issues and all sorts of DirectX errors stating that the device had been removed from the system, which it had not.
This overclock meant that we were running at 1130 MHz at load and thanks to the water cooler we topped out at 55C when gaming with this overclock and the core clock stayed pegged at 1130MHz even after a several hour long gaming marathon.
AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Stock:
AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Overclocked (+80MHz Core):
By overclocking the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X 4GB reference card we were able to take the score of 7197 on 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme and raise it up to 7591. This is a 394 point increase in our overall 3DMark score, which represents a performance gain of 5.5 percent. The overal FPS average in Graphics Test 1 went from 38.08 to 40.34 FPS, which is a 5.9% performance gain in the graphics test. Not huge performance gains, but we’ll take a free 6% performance gain any day of the week.
We benchmarked the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X 4GB video card at stock speeds and then overclocked to +80MHz core for the entirety for this review so you can see how the card performs both with stock clock speeds.