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With AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X, the red team promised us the fastest single-chip GPU on the market, but the final product didn't quite live up to the hype. An intriguing cooling solution, a small form-factor and state of the art memory tech gave Fury X some unique properties, but Nvidia had outmanoeuvred AMD on overall performance with its GeForce GTX 980 Ti. However, the new cut-down, air-cooled R9 Fury (the non-X edition, if you will) is an interesting proposition: inevitably, it will be slower, but at the mooted $550 sticker price, Nvidia has no real alternative at the same price. AMD is marketing this as a GTX 980 beater - more expensive, but faster overall. Of course, the reality is a little more complex than that, but the strategy is sound: AMD wants to carve out and own a new niche for the Fury.At its core, the air-cooled R9 Fury is indeed a cut-down version of the existing Fury X. At an architectural level, it's the same Fiji chip at the heart of the design, but there's a 12.5 per cent drop in shader count - 4096 stream processors become 3584 - while clock-speed drops from Fury X's 1050MHz to a round 1000MHz on the new card. Texture mapping units are reduced from 256 to 224, but otherwise this pared back Fiji Pro chip is much the same as the top-end Fiji XT found in Fury X.
However, in purely physical terms, the new Fury is an entirely different proposition. The short, 7.5-inch PCB for the Fury X is gone, replaced by a full-size board combined with a top-tier cooling solution. The Fiji processor is large, and while it's not the hottest, most power-hungry chip in AMD's line-up (that honour goes to the overclocked Hawaii found in the Radeon R9 390X), it's clear that the firm is taking no chances in making sure that Fiji is kept cool. The closed loop water-cooler is gone, but the alternative - premium-level heat-sinks and fans from Sapphire and Asus - are still effective in making sure that we don't find ourselves facing another overheating Hawaii situation. Throughout our testing, we never saw the Fury shift under load from its target 1000MHz boost clock, so there's no thermal throttling here and Asus' DirectCU 3 cooler is beautifully quiet - even under full load (and there's no 'coil whine' either - though in point of fact, Asus tells us that this noise tends to comes from the onboard chokes).
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