For a quick overview of AMD’s newest graphics card be sure to check out my video!

My personal benchmarks will be added soon!

Introduction

Whats up guys RED Ninja here, this will be my first time writing an article so forgive me for any mistakes, today I’ll be talking about AMD’s new graphics card, the Radeon R9 Fury X.

So I was actually one of the lucky few people to receive a review sample of the Fury X, for which I’m very thankful to AMD for sending me. I only had a couple of days with the card itself, so all I can give you is my personal experience with the new GPU, I will also be talking about the advantage of using a Freesync monitor with this card as well.

Design

So first up I’d like go into the actual looks and size of the card, comparing it to an R9 295×2 you can see that it is just about half the size measuring at 7.6 inches vs the 12 inch beast that is the 295×2. The Fury X has taken a lot of the premium design from the R9 295×2 with a lot of improvements, for example the Fury X differentiates from the 295×2 with its soft touch material on the back and side plates as well as the front plate, which also includes a nice dimpled texture design.

The logo on the front of the GPU contrasts well with the overall design and the LED Radeon logo on the side lights up and looks perfect in a red and black build.



R9 295×2 Size comparison & Fury X front plate.

On the side of the card there’s a GPU Tach which features 8+1 LEDs located above the PCIe power connectors, this monitors in realtime the intensity of the GPU operation, during typical gaming operation all 8 LED’s would be lit, whilst idling on the desktop the Fury X will go into power savings and show a single green light, users can change the colour of the LED’s from red and/or blue with a physical dipswitch located on the back of the graphics card, this is a welcomed feature to include.

Specs

Cooling

Moving onto the radiator, it includes a single high quality 120mm Nidec fan which is very silent with less than 32 dba and a max of 50 dba, the GPU temperature remains in the 50-60°C range at full load. The AMD Radeon™ R9 Fury X improves on that design by fully liquid cooling all essential components (ASIC, VRM, DRAM).

Overclocking

So straight away you can tell this is meant to be an overclocker, the power draw is around 275w, but the graphics card is equipped with two 8-pin PCIe® power connectors for a total electrical support of up to 375W based on PCIe® specifications. Which allows massive headroom for overclockers and still achieve low noise and low temperatures whilst gaming.

Included in AMD Catalyst Control Center, is the ability to adjust the maximum clock speed, set a target for temperature and max fan speed. With the R9 Fury X you are now able to set a maximum frame rate ranging between 55fps to 95fps, this will allow you to reduce the overall heat output and achieve lower fan speeds on the graphics card.

HBM

Next up is the High bandwidth memory, this has a lower power consumption and much higher bandwidth speed since the DRAM is stacked vertically on the GPU, this provides HBM to perform much faster than standard GDDR5 with less capacity.

HBM also uses 19x less surface area than GDDR5 requires, Enabling form factors through HBM to deliver incredible performance and efficiency at a small size.

Ultra HD 4K gaming

Being pushed for time I was only able to gather my experience on 4K gaming with the Fury X, so I’m unable to include benchmark results at this time.

Moving onto 4K gaming, I was able to experience 45-60fps in many of the newest titles with the graphics setting set to high and ultra, a constant 60fps is achievable at 4k with the sacrifice of certain settings such as AA (Anti-aliasing), personally I think gaming at 4k no longer requires the use of AA due to its much higher pixel density, so you can save a huge amount of performance by disabling it .

BF4

Looking at BF4 I was able to push the graphics card at 4k ultra settings with 4x Anti-aliasing.. this provided 40-50 fps, turning Anti-aliasing of the card was able to hit a constant 60fps in my testing which is incredible for a single card.

Shadow of Mordor

Taking a look at Shadow of Mordor, I expected similar results with high/ultra settings at 48-65fps, tuning down certain effects like motion blur was able to provide a much smoother experience at a constant 60fps with Vsync. An interesting thing to note, turning the texture settings to Ultra which requires 6gb of Vram, surprisingly the game didn’t warn me about using this option on a lower capacity card, showing that 4gb of HBM is able to keep up with standard GDDR5 memory.

The Witcher 3

I was able to achieve excellent performance in The Witcher 3 at ultra settings with hairworks disabled, the Fury X provided frame rates of 50-60fps, turning down to high settings provided a solid 60fps in most areas. With hairworks enabled and AMD’s tessellation optimized at 8x in CCC (AMD Catalyst Control Center) I was able to see a performance drop of around 5-10fps.

GTA 5

Moving onto GTA 5 I was able to push the setting to High and receive a solid 45-58fps which was an incredible experience. I was also able to push the game to its limits with everything maxed out on Ultra settings including the advanced tab, it was able to chug along at 30fps as a minimum which may not be the best experience but it does show of the performance the Fury X is able to achieve and was good news for the High bandwidth memory as it proved itself in this case using around 3.4GB of its 4GB capacity.

Freesync

Pairing the R9 Fury X with a Freesync monitor will offer the most incredible experience, gaming at 144hz on a 1440p Freesync monitor, enabled the smoothest experience with a constant 70-120fps in many of the newest titles.

Get rid of screen tearing and enjoy stutter free gaming with a wide range of freesync monitors.

Check out my Review of the BenQ XL2730Z Freesync Monitor

Virtual Reality

The R9 Fury X is designed to support Virtual Reality with AMD’s Liquid VR, AMD aims to enable experiences that were not possible before, which requires a strict criteria to meet,

Be sure to check out AMD’s playlist about Liquid VR for a better understanding!

Conclusion

The AMD Radeon™ R9 Fury X provides a smooth 4K gaming experience, designed and ready to support Virtual reality with AMD’s Liquid VR. Combining the Fury X with a freesync display will provide desired smoothness at 4k gaming.

If you’re looking for the best experience in Ultra HD gaming, then I would highly recommend the Fury X, that’s all for now, thank you for reading and i’ll see you in the next one!