Will the AC Radeon R9 Fury be a weaker Fury X?

Jul 6, 2015 07:13 GMT  ·  By

In our previous presentation of new custom graphics cards manufacturers that launched their versions of the Radeon Fury X, one major name was missing: ASUS. No more.

However, it won't be a liquid-cooled Fury X, but rather a normal air-cooled R9 Fury that will enjoy ASUS' own new-generation STRIX cooling solution.

Apparently, this info comes from a German retailer named Computer Shop PC, which asks €623 ($552) with VAT for the new card. The original price also suggests that the card will cost around €500 ($688) if you remove the 19% VAT.

The STRIX DirectCU III will probably arrive on this card too, as ASUS brought it first on R9 390X and GTX 980 Ti STRIX graphics cards. The Radeon R9 Fury will feature 3584 Stream Processors, down from the 4096 on the full Fury X. The Fiji-based GPU will be clocked at 1050MHz, which is identical to that of the Fury X. We have 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory that provides the same 512GB/sec of bandwidth, clocked at 500MHz (1GHz effective). We are being told to expect temperatures of the Fiji PRO-based R9 Fury to be less than 75°C, which is considerably higher than the 50°C or so from the liquid-cooled Fury X.

Air-cooled, but weaker

This dumbing-down operation was to be expected from AMD if the company wanted to enter the air-cooled solutions market in order to make it sell better. On the other hand, ASUS will surely tweak its own SKU to fit its STRIX configuration, most likely meaning an overclocked version of the factory SKU, but still with less performance than the "X" version. The R9 Fury will still feature 4GB of HBM, which is, of course, the card's main selling point.

For the price of €623, it will probably be quite competitive with the same STRIX GTX 980Ti. Unfortunately, having slower specs, it's very likely that it will perform considerably worse than the NVIDIA card, as only the Fury X manages to perform on par with the GTX 980Ti.

Price at Computer PC Shop gives us strong hints about a new ASUS Fury
Price at Computer PC Shop gives us strong hints about a new ASUS Fury

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A STRIX air-coolded Fury. Will it sell?
Price at Computer PC Shop gives us strong hints about a new ASUS Fury
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