AMD R9 Fury X 4GB Graphics Card Crossfire Review

Introduction

Here at eTeknix, we strive to give the consumer the best possible advice in every aspect of technology. Today is no different, we are extremely excited to bring you the CrossFireX review of the recently released AMD Radeon R9 Fury X. As we all know, the R9 Fury X is AMD’s latest attempt to take the crown from NVIDIA in the top end consumer GPU market. In some ways, AMD has succeeded, thanks to the introduction of a new GPU architecture and the innovative High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). With the use of HBM, it has been proven that the quantity of VRAM isn’t the issue, it is the quality of the connection and bandwidth allowance for the VRAM to do its work; although more VRAM certainly couldn’t hurt.

On the test bench today, we have the XFX version of the AMD R9 Fury X 4GB featuring HBM. As we previously saw in the standalone review, the card had more than enough power to supply 30FPS at 4K; however, 30FPS isn’t enough. Adding another card into the mix should produce very high chances of witnessing 60FPS at 4K.

The two cards in the testing bench together you can get a feel of the size of them compared to the Gigabyte G1 Gaming X99 motherboard. The attention to detail that has gone into every card is simply amazing; there isn’t a piece of cable sleeve or cable tie out of place. All of the screws are perfectly inserted and the metal is buffed up to a gorgeous shine.

A single card is a testament to AMD’s attention to detail. It’s a shame the heat shrink didn’t go all of the way to the fan cowling; leaving about 1″ of coloured cables visible.

Out of the rig, the two cards in all their glory. If the comparison to the motherboard wasn’t enough, how about next to the 120mm radiators? Due to there being no metal heat sink inside the card, it weighs next to nothing compared to the radiators.

Up close to the cards, you can see that there isn’t a dimple on the cover plate out of place and there is no frayed cable sleeving protruding from the end of the cards.

We inserted both graphics cards onto our Core i7 5820K and X99-based test system, ensuring adequate spacing for optimum cooling and that both have access to sufficient PCI-e bandwidth for CrossFire operation. These cards are the best possible option for configuring a crossfire set-up, both are the reference design, same sub-vendor, exactly the same clock speeds and the same TDP. All of this means that we can achieve the best possible scaling with little to no variations due to the mismatch of graphics cards.