ASUS Radeon R9 Fury STRIX analyzed

Cheaper - air cooled yet better then the X?

Alright guys, the Fury review is here. First an explanation on the delay of our review. Here in the Benelux (Netherlands) there was one sample available for the press. That sample needed to be rotated inbetween media. ASUS Benelux however confused the release date for reviews with the availability date and was under the impression that the review embargo was lifted on the 14th. If that was the case, we'd have had a review on launch date. However as it turned out 14th is the product availability date, ASUS Benelux got that completely mixed up and AMD did a terrible poor job organizing and arranging this launch which created even more confusion. These things sometimes happen and unfortunately it happened to us with a very important product launch, we now have the review ready (at availability date).

Today review the ASUS Radeon R9 Fury STRIX, this cut-down version of the Fury X / Fiji XT GPU which comes with the new ASUS DirectCU III air-cooler. Armed with 4GB HBM memory we'll have a look as to how the product performs, in every way possible. The second product from the Fiji GPU line-up now is available, fitted with that all new HBM memory. The initial Fury X models are liquid cooled for you, the regular R9 Fury are custom cooled and released by a few AIB partners. This means that in the months to come you will likely see both air-cooled and custom liquid or hybrid cooled products (depending on popularity and market demand). So for todays review we look at Fiji Pro, in an air-cooled solution. Two more products will be released; the Nano, which will be a small form factor product to house in a tiny PC that sits, say, in your living room and then there is Project Quantum, based on two Fiji GPUs seated on one PCB (dual-GPU). Release dates on these are completely unclear though.

Radeon R9 Fury uses the Fiji Pro GPU, and it still literally a beast as it is based on a 28nm fabrication node, that means a chip just over the size of 5 x 5cm. There's lots of good stuff going on inside that chip as, the memory you guys all know as GDDR5 typically has been seated on the graphics card PCB. Well, with the Radeon R9 Fury that has changed. AMD has made a bold move to HBM memory (we'll talk about it over the next pages), the 4 GB of memory now is seated onto the actual GPU (chip). So, try to comprehend this, the Fiji Xt GPU has 8.9 Billion transistors, and that is EXCLUDING the HBM memory chips, I know..! crazy figures right? To be able to fit all that on 28nm, well it's impressive to say the least. The GPU itself (and we'll talk in detail about it on the following pages) is based on GCN 1.2 architecture and then scaled upwards, the Fiji pro products will have 3584 shader processors whereas that is 4096 shader processors for the X model. The end result is a product with 7.2 TFLOPS of compute performance offering nice game performance in the more difficult and complex to render situations like Ultra HD gaming.

The ASUS STRIX Radeon R9 Fury is based on the same DirectCU III cooler which has been featured on the STRIX GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics cards. As stated the product comes with a Fiji Pro GPU that is a cut-down Fiji XT chip with 56 compute units and thus 3584 stream processors, 64 Raster operation units and 224 texture mapping units. The base clock for the reference AMD Radeon R9 Fury is 1000 MHz. The card chunks out 7.2 TFlops of compute performance. The card obviously has 4GB of HBM memory left in-tact at 500 MHz / 1.0 Gbps (effective data rate).

Have a peek below as what ASUS is offering. By the way there are only two partners that will manufacture air cooled Fury products, Sapphire and ASUS.

