That wasn't anything uncivil. The way that he is describing things makes it seem as though he doesn't understand how heatsinks and heatpipes work. That is why I went back and added an explanation. His argument doesn't make any sense because that isn't how heatsinks work.
EDIT: Also we have to understand that being ignorant or wrong is not necessarily a bad thing. And informing someone of something is not insulting. We all learn all the time. I don't see a problem with it whatsoever. It wasn't meant as an insult, so if he took offense, I'm sorry, but that wasn't the aim.
Could have been a bit more tactful in that reply, honestly. Something like, "Well looking at the pictures we see that there are heat pipes running the entire length, and those are carrying the heat to the third fan to dissipate."
It just seemed like your knee-jerk response was to call him out on ignorance than actually provide any explanation. But yes you did do that in the edit. :P
Back to the Fury though!
I noticed in AnandTech's article that the ASUS Strix has a lower maximum voltage, and this meant lower power draw on idle and load. I do wonder if companies will take advantage of this voltage headroom to create the smaller two-fan cards without sacrificing much thermal performance.
I would like to point out that the Asus custom pcb design includes a DVI connector. It doesn't do as good a job with cooling as the Sapphire offering, but that connector alone might sway the decision of some people. Personally, I would need to get a new monitor in order to actually be able to use the stock pcb (expensive converters are an option, but screw it, just get a new monitor because freesync).
In the anandtech review, you can see the custom pcb that asus uses in the "meet the asus R9 fury" section. They really upped the phase count. I think that has a lot to do with the decreased voltage use. Even with the worse cooler (smaller and louder), the asus model stays cooler. I think that the improved design has a lot to do with that. So yeah, a redesign (and decreased voltage and power use) could allow them to make the cooler smaller cooler, however, that would increase the pcb length, resulting in a meeting of the pcb and the cooler length which is what happened with the asus model. I think that asus did what it could to make the card smaller, meanwhile, sapphire just strapped the biggest, baddest, quietest cooler on there that it could gets its hands on. The result is the asus model. They decreased the cooler size and the power use as much as possible at the expense of the pcb length. and met in the middle.
I feel they could have reduced a lot of the length at the back instead of extending the heatsink. I know that sounds a bit counterproductive to what they were looking to achieve (Low thermals, low noise) but it would have put the card below 300mm.
Just a little off the back ASUS, that's all...
As for Sapphire, whatever. The execution of the design is good, so can't fault them for that. I don't like that they forced the form factor so heavily, but they compensate nicely with the fairly impressive thermal performance. Personally, I'd buy the Sapphire just to throw the NZXT G10 + H55 on it and disregard the heatsink entirely.
Considering that there is a heatpipe going directly to that section, and that it already has less than stellar acoustics, I don't think that asus really could have trimmed any more off. Maybe a triple slot card could have that length though....... Let's hope they don't mess up the Matrix version this time. The 290x Matrix was less than impressive imo.
They could have worked that in differently. I am no authority on heatsink design, but I still have the opinion that they could have chopped that card back by 15-30mm and just maybe increased the fan speeds. I was a huge fan of the triple-slot DCII on the 7970, and I would like to see that kind of performance dropped to dual-slot on flagships. I just have this feeling like ASUS couldn't decide on going all-out with the DCIII, or to dial it back and it left the card in this "almost but not quite" state of performance. I feel like they should have dialed it back, used two larger fans and kept the length down to the PCB. (Even if it is a custom PCB.)
I guess what I really mean to say is: I'm not impressed with the ASUS offering this go-round. I hope they can pull off better things with a Matrix version
Quick point, it's still smaller than the Sapphire out of the box, so it's got that mark of approval! Of course if you watercool the Sapphire you get your shorter card back...
Edit: Only two cards and three choices if you do your own cooling. Choices are good!
Oh and something to point out here from the AnandTech article:
When you overclock these cards they very quickly line up to the Fury X in performance. This is the best result, but others are still within 2-5 FPS.
So, R9 Fury at 1100MHz roughly equals a Fury X stock. Of course the power usage skyrockets, but anybody overclocking flagship GPUs would care very little about that.
Hmm, nice. I think that this will make way more sense than the FuryX to a lot of people. Let's just hope that availability is sorted out in a week or two, I can already see the prices going up in seveal european shops. The FuryX is still stuck at 700€, which is not great, if the Fury drops down to 550€ then it would be in direct competition to the 980 and also beat it by a considerable margin.
Not that I have to care specifically, I'm still waiting for HBM2 cards to come out before I can even think about upgrading.
Pretty excited for these. Hopefully it scales as well as the Fury X does. If so I may ditch my two R9 290s... Not that much more performance but it will be better at 4K which I primarily game at now and it is nice to have the newest thing.
Really hope the overclocking is software limited rather than hardware limited so they can actually compete much better, although given that they just put out new drivers that's looking more and more unlikely.
I wish it was just like 2% faster. Just to edge out the 980 a tiny bit more. Its so close, and at 1440p and 1080p there like isn't a difference before overclocking. With the price of the 980 likely dropping to $450 now that this has dropped, I think that might be a slightly more economical buy still. Damn, I was really hoping I could snag one of these to play Battlefront with when it comes out in November.
The first thing i thought when i saw the that cards was... Unrestricted heat rising up and out the top of the case. Verses it just getting blow around the inside lower half of the case to slowly get forced out. Just a thought. Might make the ram temps go up? So if you can position a bottom intake fan in line with the last fan section on the card. Up and straight out the case. Kind of interested in testing that.
The problem i see is that the tri-x is $580. The vapor X will probably be about $600. At those prices (i mean you are already spending $600) why not spend the extra $50 to get the full fledged Fury X?
You can get an EVGA 980 SC for $500. After seeing the HardOCP numbers, the Fury beats the 980 be a few frames in most instances, but gets bested in BF4. At $80 more, it better. I just think that all these aftermarket coolers (especially when the Vapor X comes out, which will be higher than the tri x) might as well just go for the Fury X and get 500+ more stream processors.
Good point, but that is less of an issue because the R9 Fury gets third-party designs and as we see in overclocked benchmarks that has potential to make up the 8% performance deficit from the R9 Fury X. So you spend $600 on a card that may only sit 2% behind a card that is another $50, that's not bad price to performance.
Yes the GTX 980 has and will continue to drop in price, so it can compete. I could point out how the argument of "a few frames" is normally preceded by "nVidia is beating AMD by" and followed up with comments about how nVidia is running the GPU market with it's amazing designs. Buuuut, we'll leave it be. The main thing is that aside from a couple outlying results, the R9 Fury provides 8% to 17% more performance than the GTX 980. So, an extra $80 for a mean of 13% extra performance, well that's better than the increase from the Fury to the Fury X.
Except it's not all about the SPU count, as I pointed out above.
What does this all mean? It means that people who wanted the R9 Fury are going to be happy with how it performs, and people who were holding out on a GTX 980 will buy a GTX 980 for a lowered price.
The 980 seems to perform more in line with the 390x, so having it priced closer to the 390x than the Fury would make sense. So a drop in price seems like the likely response. I would love to see the Fury at $500 though. It is awfully close to the Fury X as is. The cooler alone might sway my decision away from the Fury.