ASUS has the STRIX brand going on for a year more now and is known for its 0db fan design as well as the owlish eyes on the cooling fans. Today, we have the ASUS STRIX R9 Fury in Tech Critter's lab, the latest STRIX from ASUS feat the much hyped AMD R9 Fury.
The STRIX R9 Fury is equipped with ASUS's latest triple fan design DirectCU III cooler, AMD's R9 Fury as well as the use of HBM, High Bandwidth Memory, which looks pretty promising at this point. Let's see what kind of performance can we expect from this card!
Specifications
Unboxing
The retail packaging for the STRIX brand graphics card is now the head of the STRIX owl, which gives it a more distinctive appearance compared to the previous generation STRIX brand that still uses the notable ripped metal design.
The accessories included will be a PCIe Y-splitter (in case if you don't have that extra 8-pin PCIe cable on you PSU), a reflective STRIX logo sticker, user's manual and a driver CD.
That's one sexy looking graphics card we must say! On first look it looks nothing like the STRIX we've known to date, the cooler has a more ROG-ish theme infused to it, no owlish looking fans.
On closer inspection, you'll notice the STRIX logo stickers on each of the fans.
On the side you'll see a promising amount heatpipes that spans from the base of the cooler, we're expecting some extra cooling performance from this cooler for sure.
On the other side of the cooler you'll find the STRIX logo that has its LED glows in the breathing mode, adding some extra aesthetics to the card itself if you have a gigantic side panel window on your system.
Despite of all the fancy looks, the STRIX R9 Fury is turns out to be a power hungry card that requires 2 x 8-pin PCIe to power up.
Here's the sad part... Think again if you're planning to run a crossfire setup with the STRIX R9 Fury! No traces of the gold fingers to be found any where on the card, which really makes us sad.
Now to the backplate, we all know that these fancy looking metal piece does not only an additional points to the appearance, it also helps to strengthen the PCB of the graphics card so it's less prone to the infamous PCB sagging that happens on most graphics card with a huge and fancy cooler. And yes, that's one good looking backplate alright!
For the display output we have 3 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI and 1 x DVI-D. .
Performance Test
Test Rig Configuration | |
CPU Cooler | Corsair H100i |
CPU | I7 4790K @4.6 GHz |
Motherboard | ASUS ROG Maximus VII |
Memory | Corsair Vengeance Pro 8GB @2400 MHz |
Primary Hard Drive | Crucial M500 120 GB |
Power Supply | be quiet! Straight Power 10 |
Chassis | N/A |
Display Monitor | Dell U2312HM |
We ran a few graphically demanding games and synthetic benchmark in our possession on 1080p with the highest achievable clock speed for the GPU that is stable enough to be able to complete each benchmark with the following values:
- Maximum boost clock of 1090MHz from the stock 1000MHz
- Memory speed 600MHz from the stock 500MHz
- 1.2V on the voltage for GPU
Performance, Overclocking
We ran a few graphically demanding games and synthetic benchmarks in our possession on a selected settings, which is considered as high for much of our test as usual.The final result of each benchmark is presented in the form of the graph below:
Temperature
We've ran the burn-in test on the FurMark GPU stress test utility for 1 hour with the fan operate under normal mode and maximum fan speed mode and the temperature for both test is recorded and populated in the graph below.
Verdict
As the 2nd highest end AMD Radeon powered graphics card from ASUS, the STRIX R9 Fury is proven to be a very capable card that is able to perform near to a GTX 980 as shown in the benchmark result - Even though the overclocking potential isn't as much as we hoped for.
The fancy looking DirectCU III cooler too, isn't just about the look. In order to observe its cooling performance out of the box without any alteration, we opted for auto fan speed throughout the stress test session. The previous DirectCU II couldn't handle a R9 290X well and resulted in an unpleasant temperature of 89°C, but the DirectCU III on the other hand, got the job done pretty well with a maximum 86°C for our overclocked STRIX R9 Fury.
The fancy looking DirectCU III cooler too, isn't just about the look. In order to observe its cooling performance out of the box without any alteration, we opted for auto fan speed throughout the stress test session. The previous DirectCU II couldn't handle a R9 290X well and resulted in an unpleasant temperature of 89°C, but the DirectCU III on the other hand, got the job done pretty well with a maximum 86°C for our overclocked STRIX R9 Fury.
Price wise, the STRIX R9 Fury isn't a wallet-friendly card to begin with, given that the SRP of RM2925 that could actually get you a decent GTX 980 Ti with a little extra top up. Still, the ASUS STRIX R9 Fury is one powerful card that is worth to consider for if you're looking for a powerful AMD Radeon card and have the right budget to spend on.
Pros
- Good out of the box performance
- Good appearance
- Good cooling performance from the new DirectCU III cooler
- Makes use of high bandwidth memory (HBM)
Cons
- Hefty price tag
- Limited overclocking headroom
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