PC Build Advice/Review Thread

[Adajer]

For anyone interested, benchmarks for AMD's new Fury X are now available, and it's basically identical to the 980ti across the board. It remains to be seen if new drivers can improve anything, but atm it's not the best look for AMD.

Depending on where you look and if they are biased one way or another.

From what I have seen, it is between the 980 ti and 980. It uses a ton more power. And the non water cooled version will probably run much hotter.

For the most part I have seen it 5-20 frames behind the 980ti. It comes close in some games though.

[Adajer]

HardOCP's review of the Fury X was pretty damning. If Fury X was $500-$550, it would be solid.

I kinda shy away from HardOCP. For some reason, they will compare framerates with different settings.

For example, they compares GTA V with different max view settings.


Also to be noted. The 980ti overclocks extremely well. The fury almost not at all.

[Krandor]

Even though I wouldn't buy it I'm quite disappointed that Fury X kind of sucks. Nvidia is an awful, awful company in regards to their general business practices, and AMD had a chance to hit a home run after touting HBM and all the fancy new stuff. Instead it's just hanging out alongside what Nvidia is already offering.

[Kalmado]

So is AMD's battleship sunk? Btw, how much is the Fury X hitting for?

[Adajer]

Well, as far as price point, the fury x is the watercooled version that is $100 more.

The Regular fury is supposed to be air cooled and $550. Performance should be the same, just hotter. Never know with AMD though.

[Krandor]

Performance will not as good in the air-cooled version. The chips that don't bin as well will be put in the air-cooled version, so any kind of potential over clocking will likely be non existent.

[Arkanna]

I kinda shy away from HardOCP. For some reason, they will compare framerates with different settings.

For example, they compares GTA V with different max view settings.


Also to be noted. The 980ti overclocks extremely well. The fury almost not at all.

Yes they do that, but they also do apples-to-apples comparisons. The idea of the comparisons with different settings is to differentiate the "experiences" the cards can offer. I've read HardOCP for a very long time so I trust them well enough to believe in their comparisons.

Did you ever see any of those articles they did a long time ago, reviewing boutique vendors' systems? They shined the light on too many faults on such systems so the vendors stopped allowing them to do reviews and they eventually had to drop such articles.

[Arkanna]

So is AMD's battleship sunk? Btw, how much is the Fury X hitting for?

I wouldn't go that far, AMD has survived somehow in spite of not being able to compete well in the past. Plus people have predicted AMD's demise many times and been wrong.

AMD is working on a new CPU architecture for release next year, called Zen. They're even pushing back their ARM chips til 2017 (those were supposed to be next year, but AMD is prioritizing Zen heavily until it's out). Early analysis says that Zen looks an awful lot like an Intel CPU (imagine that). If Zen isn't competitive and just ends up being another hot-running, budget enthusiast chip that can't compete with anything Intel sells without AMD selling it at a loss, who knows what could happen then. They can only follow this pattern for so long, right?

[Krandor]

HardOCP is filled with alot of garbage, but their hardware/game performance reviews are usually quite solid.

[Krandor]

Insert your own joke about AMD's driver release schedule, but apparently the wrong drivers were sent out with the Fury X review copies.

[Adajer]

To be fair. AMD's 7000 series got a huge boost in performance from optimized drivers later in their life.

Cant say it will happen again, but it is possible.

[Krandor]

That was a slightly different story because for whatever reason they still hadn't figured out how to properly optimize their own GCN hardware. Outside of HBM giving massive memory bandwidth, there doesn't seem be any new features to figure out in the chip.

[6souls]

I just watched TB's overview on the new AMD Fury and he says it beats the 980ti at 1080p by a couple of frames, but can't compare at 4k.

https://youtu.be/vJ2wGmsdHBs?t=479

Benchmarks:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/...1#.VYyCRPlVhBd
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages...review,19.html
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/g...ury_x_review/8

[Arkanna]

Your HardOCP link doesn't even include any data @ 1080p. Their evaluation does show it being beaten pretty badly at 4k resolution. *edit* That's not completely true, my bad, but it does get beaten pretty bad where the 4GB VRAM limit shows up.
Your Guru3D link is an evaluation of the 390X, not the Fury X.
Your Overclock3d.net link shows it trading blows with a 980 and getting bested pretty handily by a 980ti @ 1080p.

I didn't watch the Youtube video so I can't comment on that. But, the Fury X comparing closely to a card that was released 9 months ago, while costing as much as a card that handily outperforms it almost around the board, is not a good look for AMD. One quote I saw and liked about the Fury X was something like, "This is the first time that I've seen AMD's GPU side release a product that had all the same issues as their CPU side's products" as in late to market, and underperforming for the price.

I am curious what the base Fury will do. Without a closed-loop water cooler, they should be able to price it quite a bit lower.

*edit* Found Guru3D's Fury X review at: http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages...-review,1.html

[Krandor]

Air cooled version will be $550 with lower binned chips.

[Arkanna]

Air cooled version will be $550 with lower binned chips.

That's not low enough.

[Kalmado]

Wow. I don't understand things such as lower binned chips and what not, but it really sounds like AMD shit the bed with this. Really sad because competition is good. I bet Nvidia is just laughing at them...

[Takiwaki]

I ordered 2 fury x, I wanted to build a simple quiet and cool system but the gtx 980ti hybrid is never in stock =/ I will let you guys know how it goes when I build it. It gets pretty hot where I live so I think its a great option. I know I should just build a water cooled system right? lol

[Krandor]

Between both AMD and Nvidia (and even some CPUs) alot of times the chips between different versions (970/980 for example) are built/assembled the same way, but since not every chip is identical they all get tested, and how well it tests ends up determining which model it ends up in.

So Fury and Fury X are fundamentally the same hardware, but the Fury will be "not as good" and has less potential overhead.

[Arkanna]

AMD and Intel have binned their CPU's forever. When a finished CPU comes off the production line, it's not actually given a model name/number until after it is tested. Some CPU's have flawed cores and won't work correctly with all cores enabled, so the defective core(s) is disabled and the CPU is sold as a lesser model (for example, remember AMD's triple-core CPU's? Those were just quad-core CPU's with a defective core that had some connections physically cut). Intel uses this idea when they produce their "K" enthusiast CPU's because those are typically bought for overclocking.

When yields are good (that is to say, when a higher percentage of the CPU's/GPU's coming off the production line are able to reach higher clock speeds within a given thermal envelope), you end up with CPU's/GPU's that are capable of more than their model leads you to believe. This results in some chips overclocking well.