AMD revealed their new line of enthusiasts video cards during E3 2015 taking their graphics range to the next level. Recently at a Sydney event, we go hands-on with the latest flagship card – the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X plus many of AMD’s recent technologies.
Straight up, we can’t detail any benchmarks or specifications of the new AMD Radeon R9 Fury X video cards because nothing was revealed during the event. What AMD did reveal was the price point of the R9 Fury X coming in at $979 AUD RRP. It was kind of unexpected to see that price point for the card but until on paper performance and benchmarks come out for the R9 Fury X, we can only speculate.
We were presented with more design details on the card during this event and AMD’s vision for it. The card has a notably smaller form factor than most high end enthusiast cards on the market. This was all thanks to the High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which the R9 Fury series will be the first to incorporate on the market. The memory allows for a small form factor design while enabling incredibly higher bandwidth. Coming in at 7.5-inches – the R9 Fury X is about 30% shorter than the Radeon R9 290X which is great for living room gaming setups.
The R9 Fury X also featured a customisable GPU Tech activity meter which measures GPU utilisation on the side next to the illuminated Radeon logo.
The other most noticeable design implementation is the card shipping with an all-in-one liquid cooler out of the box. It’s not the first card to ship with these as many third party’s have done it in the past but AMD clearly said during the event the R9 Fury X will ship with a enclosed liquid cooler regardless of vendor.
During the event, AMD had the new Fury X cards in different types of setup showcasing the possibilities with resolution. There was a Dell 5K monitor there running Dragon Age: Inquisiton which looked superb, a setup running Eyefinity (triple monitors) on the single Fury X card playing Sniper Elite 3 and Ashes of the Singularity on a 4K monitor. We tried them out and were impressed but still had that burning question of “what kind of performance are these games running at?”
AMD were pretty confident that their new cards will make some waves in the market especially with the new HBM which they were heavily emphasising during the event. The price point of the card is great cutting under NVIDIA’s latest flagship model – the GTX 980 Ti, so we’re keen to see how it will fare out on paper. Now we just have to wait.