Meet the Threesome X
GPU segment have been as boring as the CPU over the past few years. With both camp stuck with 28nm for record long duration, the performance have been crawling very up slowly. Things was about to change later 2016, but my trusty 290 died on me before the 2 node shrinks products can hit the shelf. This lead to my purchase of today's review, Sapphire Fury.
Keeping up to tradition, I got the lower binned product of my favored flagship. R3XX series is a really bad joke as they are rebranded chips with various clockspeed increase and RAM. 980 Ti is too expensive and 980 was too heavily nerfed as compared to its bigger but younger brother.
Fury is a heavily beefed up Hawaii with GCN1.2 and HBM. HBM is a high width low clockspeed memory built into the chip instead of the PCB. This is a big upgrade from GDDR5 due to higher bandwidth, lower consumption and smaller PCB.
Performance is expected as from the various professional review sites. With the Crysis days behind us, every flagship can run the games in the market at maximum fidelity. Fury perform a bit better than Hawaii at 1080 but its not like you need it since 290 already can run anything under the sun at that resolution. Whats important is Fury ability to pull ahead tremendously at higher memory scenario (Higher resolution and anti aliasing) due to HBM.
With the introduction of VSR, I have been leveraging on it to do super sampling for most of the titles it support. Upgrading to Fury will greatly increase both the resolution i can super sample to, and the frame rate.
Biggest caveat is that many titles don't support VSR on release day. As of now, Deserts of Karak and XCOM2 are the titles I'm enjoying that have yet to gain VSR support. But when it does, VSR is a beauty to behold, especially when coupled with MSAA.
The biggest difference is the thermal characteristic of the card. The PCB is really short, exposing 1/3 of the heatsink to blow the hot air directly to my RAM and CPU area. This is really helpful since I'm using closed loop for CPU and having some hot air blowing at the area, is better than none at all.
Sapphire Tri-X also features zero fan speed at idle which is really impressive. Light games like hearthstone runs totally passive, while the fans spin at really low and quiet speed during heavy load. Furthermore, the temperature never exceeds 75C nor 30% fan speed, which is really impressive for a high end card. The difference is very apparent even though I came from a graphics card using PCS+ from Powercolor. We have finally reached the trifecta of high performance, low heat, low noise for GPU (and hope it stays that way for the next gen chips).
Something suspicious is the lack of thermal diode for VRM. My PowerColor 290 PCS+ has 2 and they hover around 70C under maximum load (OCCT GPU load). Fury cards apparently took a page out of Nvidia and let the VRMs run at 100C, as reported by some of the comprehensive (or may I say neutral) review sites. A brief touch on the backplate validated the various reports as it left a slight burn on my finger! No amount of technical assurance and specifications do I sleep well with a boiling component siting in my bedroom...
It also came with some LED indicators that blink according to the load. They flicker too fast, too bright and is really distracting. The Sapphire model comes with option for red, blue and purple LED. Personally. the best option is the off option, guess I'm too old for such stuff...
But the most glaring issue about this card is its screen corruption issue. It occurs once every 2 weeks on average but its really annoying when it happened. The irony is that it occur again while typing this post which reminded me of it. Such an experience breaking issue should not have existed on a flagship on launch day. And the driver team must have its bonus and increment freeze for having it exist after half a year of the product launch! I hope the major review sites can do more to bring this issue mainstream and pressure AMD to fix it.
A pretty nice card to own nevertheless, but greatly impaired by poor driver and user experience.In summary, would I buy this card if my 290 havent died? No way, as its a safer bet to wait for the next generation chips built on the first node shrink in years.
So what is this card good for?
- Solid high resolution performance
- Low anti aliasing tax
- Passive at idle to low load, relatively quiet at high load
- Good for air flow in setup using AIO water cooler for CPU
- A sweet spot between 980 and 980 TI (both in terms of price and performance)
What is is bad?
- Screen corruption bug that exist even half a year after launch (WTF?!)
- Lower performance/Dollar compared to R290 generation
- Boiling VRMs
- VSR support could be better
Total score: 6/10
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