Conclusion
Conclusion
The R9 Fury has always been an extremely appealing card, one which offers a very good combination of performance, price and feature support but AMD seemed to have problems supplying the channels with sufficient stock. As a result, many who were anxiously waiting for it were either left waiting some more or ultimately settling for something from NVIDIA stable. That situation has gradually improved and now these cards can be easily found at every major retailer. The ASUS R9 Fury STRIX will finally be able to benefit from this uptick in availability since it is one of the better examples of what AMD has been able to accomplish.
From a raw framerate standpoint, the STRIX is a pretty straightforward affair: it doesn’t offer one iota more visible performance than a reference-spec’d card. It simply can’t. Until AMD releases their tight grip on the board partners’ abilities to pre-overclock their cards, even the best R9 Furies like ASUS’ STRIX will ultimately fail to distinguish themselves from their competition. As a result of those stringent limits ASUS was able to boost core speeds by a laughable 20MHz and actual manual overclocking seems to be tightly constrained as well. An “overclocker’s dream” this is not.
With that being said ASUS has done their absolute best to distinguish their card from the offerings of Sapphire, PowerColor and AMD’s other board partners. That was accomplished by adding the DirectCU III cooler to the card, a heatsink that is one of the graphics card industry’s best. The results are pretty astonishing, especially when compared against Sapphire’s R9 Fury Tri-X. Not only is it more compact but it is also quieter and manages to deliver lower temperatures. How ASUS’ engineers managed to accomplish this is anyone’s guess but the fact remains that they have something special on their hands.
It’s almost impossible not to recommend the ASUS R9 Fury but there are some points everyone should be aware of before taking the plunge. First and foremost, for whatever reason ASUS’ card almost always seems to be more expensive than alternatives from Sapphire, PowerColor and other AMD board partners. 20MHz higher frequencies shouldn’t account for a $20 premium. The reasoning behind this is shaky at best since other vendors boast advanced cooling, upgraded components and cool features but many gamers have taken to calling it the “ASUS tax” since it permeates many of ASUS’ SKUs.
Another slight hiccup is the dreaded inductor whine. This issue nearly ruined our experience with the awesome R9 Nano and it rears its head here as well, though to a much lesser extent. There was a slight buzz during scenarios where framerates exceeded the 200 FPS mark (such as in menus) but as evidenced by our acoustics charts, during normal gameplay it completely disappeared. Most gamers won’t find any problems with this but if you play high framerate games like DOTA, StarCraft or Diablo III, prepare to enabled V-SYNC or FreeSync to cap framerates and avoid unnecessary noise.
All in all the ASUS R9 Fury STRIX is an awesome card for anyone who is looking for a sub-$600 GPU upgrade. It sits within a price and performance range currently unoccupied by any NVIDIA product and with a bit of overclocking (which is all that’s in the tank) it can run alongside the significantly more expensive R9 Fury X. Granted, the ASUS card is slightly more expensive than its competitors but the combination of temperatures, acoustics and features it offers is second to none.
