AMD's cut-down, air-cooled R9 Fury is a 4K contender

[Administrator]

AMD has lifted the lid on the cheaper, cut-down, air-cooled version of its top-end R9 Fury X - and we've had a day of hands-on time with the new product. Our initial thoughts? Some of the cutbacks may look significant and the small form-factor of the top-tier product is gone, but the new non-X Fury offers an accomplished level of performance at ultra-HD resolution. On top of that, initial overclocking results paint an interesting picture of Fury performance when compared to the full-fat product.
As far as we're aware, only two different Fury boards are available at launch, with key AMD partners Sapphire and Asus offering up designs based on their top-end tri-fan coolers. Our test board comes from the latter, using its new DirectCU 3 technology - and it's a beautiful piece of kit, more than up to the task of cooling the large Fiji processor. We noted max temperatures in the mid-70s Celsius, even when overclocked - though this was on an open air test bed.
In terms of the Fury itself, the inevitable comparisons with the top-end X model reveal a drop from 4096 to 3584 shaders (a loss of 12.5 per cent in shading resources) while texture units drop from 256 to 224. Base clock speeds drop from 1050MHz to 1000MHz. Otherwise, the spec remains static - the all-important next-gen HBM memory remains in effect at the full 4GB, still running at 500MHz.
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