A flagship card oozing silent gaming fury
AMD has fallen short in the last month. With many of us hoping the red team would finally pull back a win from the boys in green, it was with disappointment that we witnessed those Fury X benchmarks come through. All in all, the battle seemed lost. The war was over. Until now.
The standard Fury is a different beast entirely. Although being the little brother to the Fury X, and still housing the same memory and GCN architecture setup, there’s one major difference between the two – AMD doesn’t make these cards. Which is why we’ve arrived here, the Asus STRIX R9 Fury Direct CU III overclocked edition. Coming in at an impressive 1,020MHz overclock, 30MHz less than the Fury X, this card features 500-odd less stream processors than its disappointing big brother. However, if the GTX 980 Ti taught us anything, it’s that having less CUDA cores or stream processors doesn’t necessarily take you out of the running.
But let’s talk about the card itself. Asus is one of the first companies to take on the challenge of fully automating its PCB production line. The entire card – from chip and memory, to board and capacitors – is built by robots. Fortunately, this hasn’t drastically upped its price. Even though the new technologies have cost Asus an arm and a leg to develop, the reduction in labour costs are equally significant. What this means for us end users is no more soldering, no more flux and no more sharp bumps. The level of reliability and quality control is fantastic, beyond anything so far in the graphics card industry.
That’s all good and dandy, but how does the card actually perform, right? The DC III has been under request for years, and for cooling capacity, the Strix does not disappoint. Providing three 92mm fans to cool two exclusive 10mm direct GPU contacting heat-pipes, this card has phenomenal GPU-chilling potential.
What Asus has done here, however, is analyse how this cooling is applied. Instead of trying to keep the card below 30–40°C at all times, it’s worked on making sure noise control is the top priority. Each fan runs independently on a 0dB fan curve, as has become quite common recently. However, unlike the vast majority of the competition’s solutions, this 0dB technology is embedded into GPU load, as opposed to temperature. What this ensures is that as soon as you’re out of game, your card isn’t creating any unnecessary noise to cool down a GPU that can gently ramp down anyway. This is a card that, at max, spins at 40 per cent. Even then it’s barely audible, even on our open test bed. Impressive, to say the least.
When it comes to performance, this is where Asus and AMD to some extent blew us away. For a card that comes in to the market at roughly £450, it performs incredibly well. Overclocking, we managed to push the core clock up another 100MHz over stock (70MHz over Asus’s stock settings). Yet even as we dialled back for our benchmarking process, the scores were still only a few frames per second behind that of the Fury X. This was something we utilised GPU Tweak II to achieve, as Asus has allowed access to the power limit feature within the card. It’s worth noting, however, that High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) still doesn’t overclock at all.
All in all, this card is brimming with neat features, it looks stunning, and it performs almost as well as AMD’s flagship for a price comparable to a GTX 980. What Asus has put together is a phenomenal bit of hardware, and we’re going to be sad to see it leave. ZAK STOREY
SPECIFICATIONS
GPU AMD Fury
Stream processors 3,584
Texture units 224
ROPs 64
Transistors 8.9 billion
Memory capacity 4,096MB HBM
TDP 275W
Connectivity 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI, 1x DVI-I