XFX R9 Fury Triple Dissipation Review

XFX R9 Fury Triple Dissipation Testing:

Finding out the amount of FPS performance delivered by XFX's R9 Fury will consist of running it and comparison cards through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of a range of capabilities to show where each card falls on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles, which should be able to provide an idea of how the cards perform relative to each other.

The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustments will be made to the respective control panels during the testing to approximate the performance the end user can expect with a stock driver installation. I will be testing the cards at their stock speeds to see how they stack up and will test each one to find the maximum stable overclock. The cards will be placed in order from highest to lowest performance in each graph to show where they fall by comparison. Resolutions of 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440, and 3840 x 2160 will be used.

Testing Setup:

• Processor: Intel Sixth Generation Core i7 6700K @ 4.5GHz
• CPU Cooling: Custom Water cooling from Swiftech
• Motherboard: ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Extreme
• Memory: G.Skill Trident Z 16GB 3400Mhz
• Video Cards: XFX R9 Fury
• Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
• Hard Drive: Corsair Force GT 240GB SSD x2
• Optical Drive: Lite-On Blu-ray
• Case: Corsair Obsidian 650D
• OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Comparison Video Cards:

• XFX R9 390X DD
• MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G
• PNY GTX 980 XLR8

XFX R9 Fury Triple Dissipation Overclocking:

• XFX R9 Fury Triple Dissipation: Core 1130MHz, Memory 560MHz

Overclocking on AMD's Fury series was initially an almost futile effort without modifying the card, thanks to the stringent applied voltages on them. The lack of over voltage support did not help matters much, either. At least at the time of this review over voltage control is available via several of the popular GPU overclocking utilities. The added capability allows the end user to tweak the XFX R9 Fury's clock speeds to tap into that next level of performance. To maximize the clock speeds on this card from XFX, I bumped the power limit to the maximum level and started bumping up the clock speeds on the Fiji Pro core, then testing in steps of 25MHz until I reached 1100MHz on the core. At that point the clock speeds were not quite stable enough for gaming use. I then started bumping up the voltage to the card and reached a final core clock speed of 1130MHz with an applied +66mv voltage increase. Thankfully, XFX's Triple Dissipation cooling system is able to fully handle the voltage increase, delivering best in class cooling.

Bumping up the 4GB of HBM memory was not as fruitful, but I was still able to gain another 60MHz of clock speed on the memory for a final clock speed boot of 560MHz. While that may not seem like much, the bandwidth increase is huge and does positively impact FPS performance. An increase of roughly 13% on the Fiji Pro core and 12% on the High Bandwidth Memory are just better than the average increases I have seen on these cores from AMD.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Testing for the maximum clock speed consisted of looping Unigine Heaven 4.0 for thirty minutes each to see where the clock speeds failed when pushed. If the clock speed adjustment failed, then the clock speeds and tests were re-run until they passed a full hour of testing.

• Gaming Tests:

1. Fallout 4
2. Grand Theft Auto V
3. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
4. Far Cry Primal
5. Battlefield 4
6. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
7. Hitman (2016)
8. Tom Clancy's The Division
9. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0
10. 3DMark

• Usage:

1. Temperatures
2. Power Consumption