The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS

Overclocking

Finally, no review of a high-end video card would be complete without a look at overclocking performance.

As was the case with the R9 Fury X two weeks ago, overclockers looking at out of the box overclocking performance are going to come away disappointed with the R9 Fury cards. While cooling and power delivery are overbuilt on both the Asus and Sapphire cards, the R9 Fury is still very restricted when it comes to overclocking. There is no voltage control at this time (even unofficial) and the card’s voltage profile has been finely tuned to avoid needing to supply the card with more voltage than is necessary. As a result the card has relatively little overclocking potential without voltage adjustments.

Neither R9 Fury card is able to overclock as well as our R9 Fury X, indicating that these are likely lower quality (or lower headroom) chips. Ultimately we’re able to get another 75MHz out of the ASUS, for 1075MHz, and another 60MHz out of the Sapphire, for 1100MHz.

Meanwhile with unofficial memory overclocking support now attainable via MSI Afterburner, we’ve also tried our hand at memory overclocking. There’s not a ton of headroom here before artifacting sets in, but we were able to get another 10% (50MHz) out of both R9 Fury cards.

Using our highest clocking card as a reference point, the Sapphire card, the actual performance gains are in the 7-10% range, with an average right up the middle at 8% over a reference clocked R9 Fury. This is actually a bit better than the R9 Fury X and its 5% performance gains, however it’s still not going to provide a huge difference in performance. We’d need to be able to overclock to better than 1100MHz to see any major overclocking gains on the R9 Fury cards.

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