Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri-X OC Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X was certainly an interesting video card thanks to Fiji and High-Bandwidth Memory, but it fell a little short in the expectation department as it didn’t beat the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti in a clean sweep like many predicted. We only got our hands on the AMD Radeon R9 Fury a day ago, but we were caught a little off guard by how well the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri-X OC performed. Granted, the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri-X OC runs $569 as you are paying a $20 premium to have a binned R9 Fury card that comes clocked at 1040MHz instead of 1000MHz. Besides the binning and core clock speed difference this card is identical to the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri-X that runs $549.

The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X in stock form was found to be roughly 5.3% faster than the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri-X OC. That is a good thing for the Radeon R9 Fury as at $569 it costs 12% less and is only 5% slower. AMD has a very solid card here that can perform better than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 with reference clock speeds and even factory overclocked cards like the ASUS Poseidon GTX 980. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 cards run around $510 to $570, so AMD has a competitive card here.

We have been told to expect overclocking performance on the AMD Radeon R9 Fury card to top out at around 1100MHz and we were able to get our particular card up to 1082MHz. This isn’t a huge overclock on a card that comes from the factory at 1040MHz, but there is still some overhead left in it for those that want to push their graphics card to the bleeding edge.

We’ve only had this card for a very short period of time, but it looks solid and while we have to send this card back to Sapphire so another site can review it in the coming days we hope to get another card in for testing where we have more than 24 hours to play around with it! For now we are happy with the Radeon R9 Fury performance numbers and at $549 the Sapphire Radeon R9 Tri-X looks like a pretty good buy. Spending an extra $20 for a 40MHz overclock might make the Sapphire Radeon R9 Tri-X OC worth it for some, but we are pretty certain you can overclock the standard Tri-X card to 1040MHz as Sapphire leaves a little overclocking headroom in every card.

Legit Bottom Line: The Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri-X OC looks like a pretty decent little card that can perform better than a GeForce GTX 980!