I expected this to be posted already, but it appears as though it isn't posted anywhere here yet, so here we go. The reviews for the air cooled R9 Fury are now available. Links below.
From what I have seen, at $550, the Fury makes a good bit of sense. It is supposed to be the direct competitor to the 980. Since both of them have 4gb of vram, that is no longer an issue (as it was with the Fury X vs 980ti topic). However the vram is HBM vs GDDR5 if that matters to you at all (actual performance matters more of course). The 980 uses a lot less power, but generally performs below the Fury. When overclocked, the Fury trades blows with the Fury X but I haven't seen OC Fury vs OC 980 numbers just yet (there are a lot of reviews to read though). It is pretty amusing to me to see the small pcb paired with full length coolers though.
Darn it I was working on this exact post on another tab!
Anyway yeah it pretty much sits on top of the GTX 980 in every game, even down to 1440p in most cases. It's surprisingly not that much slower than the Fury X... And that's good. They are only $100 apart and should show that value in the benchmarks.
I, for one, will be interested to see how crazy these cards will get once we start seeing Lightning, ROG, and Vapor X versions with insane VRMs and cleaner board designs.
Now the GTX 980 will drop in price and nVidia fans will rejoice.
I'm pretty happy with the Fury. For the price I'm impressed with it. I'm sure once OCing gets unlocked and expanded we'll see some more performance too and of course the price will drop...
But as I figured, as is usually the case, it is always the smarter move to buy the non X version.
I don't understand why most of the OEMs made the card extend longer than it needed to be. that massive extra fan on the Tri-X made no sense in my honest opinion it's not cooling anything. I'm curious to see if Gigabyte or ASUS or even Sapphire will make an ITX card of this, or at least if they are capable of doing so.
ASUS Mini DCII on this card would be awesome, but I feel that everyone is waiting for the R9 Nano to release before they throw all the nice ITX coolers onto cards.
i doubt it. the nano is cool but realistically i think it's just going to perform like the 390x. if not a TINY bit better. as for the R9 Fury, there should be smaller options. AMD kept promoting LOOK HOW SMALL OUR CARD IS ITS POWERFUL. yet we can't have it unless we get the nano? it defeats the purpose and AMD's claims really.
You also have to take into account that the Fury is capable of consuming 300-400 watts during a torture test, and ~250 watts while gaming. Can a cooler that small realistically handle those loads? I mean, this thing is consuming way more power than a 980. Could you expect a cooler that small to be able to handle the heat off a 980? It is estimated that the Nano will use about 120 watts while gaming. A cooler that small can probably handle that much, but 250 watts? Not likely. Does the cooler need to be the same length as the cooler on the 390x? The 390x uses about 350 watts while gaming from what I've seen. Compare that to the 250 watts while gaming of the Fury, and it seems like it doesn't need to be nearly as long, but definitely longer than the pcb, I am better. I expect sooner or later we will start seeing smaller versions come out.
I've been impressed with how the r9 Fury has performed according to the benchmarks. I'm hoping we will see a vapor-x edition of the r9-fury. It's nice to see the r9 fury trade blows with the 980 but I want to see how it performs when overclocked against an overclocked 980. I personal believe that HBM is necessary for the future of graphic cards. You might think AMD is the only one doing it but that's incorrect. Nvidia has also invested into HBM and we will see it with Pascal supposedly. As the card industry moves from 28 nm to 16 nm they will need a better way to handle the ram on the card and HBM is going to be it in my opinion.
I personally want to see what happens when this thing is paired with a full water block. Can we squeeze some more OC headroom out of it? The overclocking so far has been none-too-impressive thus far, but I keep thinking that a waterblock might help.
you could argue the same for the Nano. so it wouldn't make sense. it's still the exact same core. just like the 290 ran just as hot as the 290x. despite AMD cutting off a few things on the non-x cards like they always do. the 980ti which is known to be efficient runs hot. despite the low TDP.
The R9 Nano is supposed to use significantly less power than the Fury or the Fury X, so yes, the cooler should be able to handle it. The Nano was meant for small form factor designs like this. It is meant to use less power and put out less heat so that it can use such a small cooler. We aren't talking about a 290 vs 290x situation here. That would be the Fury X vs the Fury. This card was designed from the beginning to be a small form factor, efficient card. The goal is somewhere close to 120 watts of power which is why such a small cooler may be able to work. I really don't know how to better explain it to you. These are apple and oranges. The Fury uses too much power for such a small cooler. The Nano is aimed at using less power so that a such a small cooler can actually work.
I disagree about the Fury not being able to be made into a a smaller form-factor. we can clearly see ASUS and Sapphire Extended the card for no reason, the third fan on the GPUs are not cooling anything but fins that aren't really receiving any heat.
Those fins are cooling the heat pipes which are attached to the core. I don't think that you are completely understanding how heatsinks work.
EDIT: We has to realize that the only things on the card which need to be cooled are the gpu core, the memory, and the vrms. The core has the memory in this case, so what we are left with is the core and the vrms. Those are not cooled by fans directly, but by using heatpipes to move the heat away from where it is and to the fins for dissipation by the fans. Whether or not the fins are above the card is irrelevant. Think of a cpu cooler. Most of the larger air coolers don't have fans blowing down onto the motherboard. They blow sideways (or up) to pass air over the fins that are attached to the heatpipes.
