An Epic Fury X Review : Quad Fury X vs Quad TITAN X

[DGLee]

Sorry for such an arrogant title I'm from a small forum in Korea and recently wrote a review on AMD Fury X - not only the article about Fury X itself alone but also about its crossfire configuration as well as the competitor's. I carefully guess this is the first 4-way crossfire/sli benchmark for either Fury X, TITAN X or 980 Ti. Hope you enjoy this thread

Note that the images below all contain Korean characters, that you may not understand and may bother you. I'm quite regretful of that, but I'm sure that the images themselves can tell most of the story.

Okay. This is my test rig configuration table.

...and this is what I covered during the test. 12 game titles plus two version of 3DMark (11 and Fire Strike) are used.

I'm going to skip the chapter showing detailed result for each game title due to # of images limit in this forum. Let's go directly to the performance analysis chapter instead. (The original publisher (http://iyd.kr/753) contains all detailed data for each game.)

I analyzed the whole data via two different ways - one is just summing up the whole framerates measured in each game title while the another one is take average of the performance numbers normalized by that of single TITAN X in each game title. I named the former "Accumulated Framerates" and the latter "Average Relative Performance (ARP)".

In addition to that, in taking ARP for all 12 games + 2 variants of 3DMark, there surely are some games not supporting (or at least the scale is very poor) multi GPU configuration. To avoid bias, I decided to offer both ARP analysis : ARP of -literally- all games and 3DMark, as well as the ARP without three multi-GPU-incapable titles.

Well, let's first put an eye on FHD (1920 x 1080) result. Here they are : AF, ARP, and ARP w/o multi-GPU incapable titles.

Seconly the QHD result.

Lastly the UHD result.

Below is multi-GPU scaling chart.

Okay. You've overseen the whole numbers at a glance. The point is that, whether Fury X shows poor performance in low resolution or not, the efficiency of crossfire is pretty good. To tell the truth, what's really good is not the "efficiency" but pure performance itself : Crossfired Fury X actualy beat out TITAN X SLI in most of test scenarios. To make it simple to understand, let's summarize the whole result in one table. Here it is.

See what I mean?

Well, my thread is finally over. Thanks for reading such long (and written in poor English) article.

 

[Frick]

WHAT THE HELL'S WRONG WITH YOU MAN KIDS ARE READING THIS FORUM

It almost looks photoshopped.

 

[the54thvoid]

@DGLee - did you genuinely have 4 cards or are you "theorizing"?

 

[DGLee]

@DGLee - did you genuinely have 4 cards or are you "theorizing"?

Surely I have. No, precisely I "had" those cards.

 

[DGLee]

WHAT THE HELL'S WRONG WITH YOU MAN KIDS ARE READING THIS FORUM

It almost looks photoshopped.

lol well this seems less 'photoshopped-like' I guess

 

[GhostRyder]

I had heard that cfx scaling was really good on these cards. This is a little better than expected, must be where the memory starts to show its power!

 

[Ikaruga]

Thank you

 

[btarunr]

Surely I have. No, precisely I "had" those cards.

Quad-SLI is probably causing temperature-based throttling on the air-cooled NVIDIA cards. To keep sync, even the cooler cards' clocks are synced with the hotter ones'.

 

[Mussels]

this actually answers a question i posed in the HBM overclocking thread - would the extra 'wasted' HBM bandwidth be a benefit to crossfire - the answer appears to be a yes.

 

[v12dock]

Scales quite well I suppose I need to pick up a second one

 

[qubit]

Nice review. Looks like there's some pretty good performance to be had if someone has the money.

I'd like to know how anyone with 4 Fury X cards would mount all those watercooling fans in the case though. Even if you found space for them in a large case, the short tubing wouldn't reach the furthest fan mountings.

 

[Caring1]

I definitely see heat issues with this set up

 

[15th Warlock]

Amazing scaling for the Fury! Seems like crossfire scaling is better than SLI scaling at the moment, when using referral cards. Thank you for the review!

The last time I went for a quad card configuration was a quad SLI 680 rig, but the scaling was so atrocious going from two to three and even worse when going to four cards, that I decided to never do that again.

I wonder what those graphs would look like if all systems were water cooled, as the Nvidia cards are probably throttling heavily as previously suggested due to the limited airflow in such configuration, Fury in its reference form gets the upper hand in this scenario, too bad it is impractical to set four individual radiators in almost any case available right now.

 

[the54thvoid]

this actually answers a question i posed in the HBM overclocking thread - would the extra 'wasted' HBM bandwidth be a benefit to crossfire - the answer appears to be a yes.

I don't think that's HBM. Since Hawaii, AMD has started to scale better than Kepler and now Maxwell.
It's what draws me to a possible Fury X crossfire build. The problem is (due to the way some games are developed) the crossfire support isn't as widespread as Nvidia's. I know it covers most games but some big titles still have shady crossfire support.

 

[GreiverBlade]

I'd like to know how anyone with 4 Fury X cards would mount all those watercooling fans in the case though. Even if you found space for them in a large case, the short tubing wouldn't reach the furthest fan mountings.

if you need the stock cooling on a reference card (any card): you're doing it wrong (imho and only imho) if i had a quad fury X CFX i would go 4 EK block alongside and a appropriate loop

altho i don't see where is the problem (if you buy 4 Fury X you have a adapted case and the knowledge to fit them inside )

I don't think that's HBM. Since Hawaii, AMD has started to scale better than Kepler and now Maxwell.
It's what draws me to a possible Fury X crossfire build. The problem is (due to the way some games are developed) the crossfire support isn't as widespread as Nvidia's. I know it covers most games but some big titles still have shady crossfire support.

well even with nvidia a multi GPU is not recommended ... aka: both brand are bad at it ... and single gpu solutions are enough, thought it's not what will keep me away to buy a 2nd 980 Poseidon later.
enthusiast point of view, technically don't care,
on the contrary SLI/CFX rigs for regular customer are just marketing ie a advertisement i did read on one of the aforementioned rig: "you can configure a multiple GPU for that computer for up to 3 time the POWER! 1 to 3 card working together, ie: 3x 980Ti 6gb which mean 2 time the power of a 980Ti and also 18gb video ram" misleading and also a total lie plus, you should see the overprice asked for any upgrade or options possible, it would make apple pass for a saint and a charity organization

question what reason make you use SLI or CFX (curiosity)

nonetheless interesting review.

 

[qubit]

if you need the stock cooling on a reference card (any card): you're doing it wrong (imho and only imho) if i had a quad fury X CFX i would go 4 EK block alongside and a appropriate loop

altho i don't see where is the problem (if you buy 4 Fury X you have a adapted case and the knowledge to fit them inside )
View attachment 66423

That picture isn't all that clear, but it looks like all the fans have been squeezed in. I can account for three fans, but am I right that the fourth one is the right hand one of the two top ones?

I don't believe that one should be forced into changing the stock cooler on today's cards, as they should be of good enough quality to just plug the thing in and go. If one especially wants water cooling for extreme overclocking, then that's of course another matter.

My MSI cards with non reference cooling for example certainly don't need their cooler changed. This model got a super high rating in TPU's review and impressed W1z so much that he ended up using it in his personal rig.

 

[GreiverBlade]

That picture isn't all that clear, but it looks like all the fans have been squeezed in. I can account for three fans, but am I right that the fourth one is the right hand one of the two top ones?

I don't believe that one should be forced into changing the stock cooler on today's cards, as they should be of good enough quality to just plug the thing in and go. If one especially wants water cooling for extreme overclocking, then that's of course another matter.

My MSI cards with non reference cooling for example certainly don't need their cooler changed. This model got a super high rating in TPU's review and impressed W1z so much that he ended up using it in his personal rig.

the pics (who is perfectly clear to me since i see all the position of the rads include the CPU AIO) show a Corsair H110i GT on the top and the 4th Fury X rad is on the front: well yes he didn't need to change his stock cooler ... ahah and the stock cooler is good enough nonetheless.

(if you buy 4 Fury X you have a adapted case and the knowledge to fit them inside ).

in the end this is the point

My MSI cards with non reference cooling for example certainly don't need their cooler changed. This model got a super high rating in TPU's review and impressed W1z so much that he ended up using it in his personal rig.

wrong example i did write "reference card" ie: my R9 290

i didn't water cool it to squeeze more mhz, in the process there was also aesthetic reason and noise reason, not that a stock hamster wheel at 65% perma is quieter than my quad 1800rpm (100% ) 120mm tho
my Poseidon Platinum 980 didn't need a block change thanks to the waterpipe added on the DCUII-H2O (even if only on fan it would be sufficient ... i just wanted to recycle my Phobya G-Changer 240 V2 )
also i bet i could fit 4 fury X in my AIR540 the tubing of the card would be too long for at last 3 of them and i would have to shift the 240 rad of the Triton above the casing instead of just under
tho ... even 2 of them would be sufficient

 

[qubit]

@GreiverBlade Sorry, I missed your question on why I've gone SLI. In short, I wasn't going to go SLI.

I bought the first 780 Ti back in January 2014 for around £500, when it was still a new model and have been very happy with it, especially with that amazing non reference cooler. I don't like loud cards, but seriously dude, with this model noise is a thing of the past!

Then Big Maxwell was on the cards early this year and the performance gain didn't seem it would be all that compelling over what I have, we didn't know when it would be released and the price was gonna be £500+ for sure, which it is.

Then in March, Scan saw me coming lol and had the exact same model for sale that I had. It's discontinued now, but they must have gotten a job lot of them and were flogging it for £340, including the shipping. Given the above about Big Maxwell, I jumped and bought one. And to be honest, I don't really regret it, either. Performance is really good, noise is only a tad louder while gaming and almost no SLI issues. Only UT2004 is completely broken with it which really pisses me off as I still like to play it a lot, but otherwise it's all good.

I'm gonna skip Maxwell and see what Pascal has to offer, which is gonna be a lot more powerful, plus I'll hopefully be on Skylake by then too, which will hopefully have noticeably better gaming performance than my 2700K, although I wouldn't bank on it from what I've read about it so far.

My trusty 2700K is defnitely showing its limits now when I'm trying to hit a steady 120fps on a 120Hz display vsync locked with modern games. On top of this, my system isn't 100% stable at stock, which is why I don't overclock the CPU nowadays (I never overclock the graphics card anyway). Been meaning to start a thread on this, but I haven't gone through enough troubleshooting steps yet to warrant it and to be honest, I may never bother as I hope to change it out sooner rather than later. The problem is very intermittent and we're talking about a bsod at startup and even rarer, while it's running.

Re the reference card, well you didn't mention the R9 290, so I can't know you're thinking about this model! Anway, yeah, why am I not surprised that AMD fucked up with the cooler on the R9 290. I remember facepalming hard when the reviews came out and the cooler was revealed to be so unnecessarily lame. You really shouldn't have had to water cool it to get decent noise levels out of it and to prevent throttling. To be fair, even NVIDIA's stock cooler is leaving something to be desired now when it comes to preventing throttling, but at least they're not too noisy. Heck, my 780 Ti with non-reference cooler will also throttle, which is rather annoying. MSI Afterburner is very revealing in this respect.

 

[GreiverBlade]

@GreiverBlade Sorry, I missed your question on why I've gone SLI. In short, I wasn't going to go SLI.

I bought the first 780 Ti back in January 2014 for around £500, when it was still a new model and have been very happy with it, especially with that amazing non reference cooler. I don't like loud cards, but seriously dude, with this model noise is a thing of the past!

Then Big Maxwell was on the cards early this year and the performance gain didn't seem it would be all that compelling over what I have, we didn't know when it would be released and the price was gonna be £500+ for sure, which it is.

Then in March, Scan saw me coming lol and had the exact same model for sale that I had. It's discontinued now, but they must have gotten a job lot of them and were flogging it for £340, including the shipping. Given the above about Big Maxwell, I jumped and bought one. And to be honest, I don't really regret it, either. Performance is really good, noise is only a tad louder while gaming and almost no SLI issues. Only UT2004 is completely broken with it which really pisses me off as I still like to play it a lot, but otherwise it's all good.

I'm gonna skip Maxwell and see what Pascal has to offer, which is gonna be a lot more powerful, plus I'll hopefully be on Skylake by then too, which will hopefully have noticeably better gaming performance than my 2700K, although I wouldn't bank on it from what I've read about it so far.

My trusty 2700K is defnitely showing its limits now when I'm trying to hit a steady 120fps on a 120Hz display vsync locked with modern games. On top of this, my system isn't 100% stable at stock, which is why I don't overclock the CPU nowadays (I never overclock the graphics card anyway). Been meaning to start a thread on this, but I haven't gone through enough troubleshooting steps yet to warrant it and to be honest, I may never bother as I hope to change it out sooner rather than later. The problem is very intermittent and we're talking about a bsod at startup and even rarer, while it's running.

Re the reference card, well you didn't mention the R9 290, so I can't know you're thinking about this model! Anway, yeah, why am I not surprised that AMD fucked up with the cooler on the R9 290. I remember facepalming hard when the reviews came out and the cooler was revealed to be so unnecessarily lame. You really shouldn't have had to water cool it to get decent noise levels out of it and to prevent throttling. To be fair, even NVIDIA's stock cooler is leaving something to be desired now when it comes to preventing throttling, but at least they're not too noisy. Heck, my 780 Ti with non-reference cooler will also throttle, which is rather annoying. MSI Afterburner is very revealing in this respect.

the question was originally aimed @the54thvoid but also in a general manner, since i, most of the time, fail to see the real benefit of a SLI or CFX (and i had a GTX 580 Matrix Platinum SLI for a moment which i reverted to single card since then, 290 then 980 then ... time will tell. )

as for the performances of a 780 SLI is on par or slightly above my own 980 a pair of Ti's would be way sufficient to skip Maxwell indeed (if SLI CFX was really useful in the end ... scaling support and such trivial matter make it not so shiny imho)

 

[newconroer]

I still find the rad on the Fury to be ridiculously clunky. Where exactly should you put it? Assuming of course you've already managed to route it out of a tower - is that through the back or do we have to cut holes in the case panel? And do you just let it hang somewhere, or sit on the carpet? Should you lay down a little wooden board? Will it think it's on a mini broadway stage and forget what they are doing?

Are we going to have to stock up on zipties so we can strap and unstrap it from the case?

 

[Caring1]

I still find the rad on the Fury to be ridiculously clunky. Where exactly should you put it?

Seriously?
Most modern cases have room for at least 3 120mm fans with radiators, and you want to make stupid suggestions about routing them out of a case?

 

[GreiverBlade]

I still find the rad on the Fury to be ridiculously clunky. Where exactly should you put it? Assuming of course you've already managed to route it out of a tower - is that through the back or do we have to cut holes in the case panel? And do you just let it hang somewhere, or sit on the carpet? Should you lay down a little wooden board? Will it think it's on a mini broadway stage and forget what they are doing?

Are we going to have to stock up on zipties so we can strap and unstrap it from the case?

Seriously?
Most modern cases have room for at least 3 120mm fans with radiators, and you want to make stupid suggestions about routing them out of a case?

as i wrote in my 2 previous post ... someone who want to do that ... is prepared and know where he will put the cards rad (well ... a normal logical someone...) my AIR540 has a 6x120 or 5x140 configuration
many case can accommodate 1 or more of them with ease (IE: a AIR540 or a Phantek, seeming that it's a Enthoo but i can't pinpoint the variation) ofc if you have a mITX case or a case that can't fit that ... then choose something else (or do like i would ... EK WB and a loop but ofc it's imho)


btw... temp of the 4 card under load : 48-56°c
http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-4-way-crossfire-setup-benchmarked_167338
https://twitter.com/TheMattB81

 

[HTC]

Anyone know if a eyefinity 4K review and comparing to nVidia's 980 Ti / Titan X has been done yet?

Obviously, a single card will be insufficient and, probably, a 2nd card will not be enough, so i'm thinking 3 or 4 cards to run this.

From this review here it's apparent that 4 GB in HBM "format" is more then sufficient to drive 4K in CF configs. I'm just wondering if HBM will show it's limitations (if any) in such scenario.

 

[Mussels]

I don't think that's HBM. Since Hawaii, AMD has started to scale better than Kepler and now Maxwell.
It's what draws me to a possible Fury X crossfire build. The problem is (due to the way some games are developed) the crossfire support isn't as widespread as Nvidia's. I know it covers most games but some big titles still have shady crossfire support.

crossfire and SLI really only add the GPU power, since hte VRAM is duplicated. One of the major reasons SLI and crossfire dont scale well beyond 2 cards, is the VRAM itself becomes the limit - the HBM overclocking threads showed that these cards have an excess of VRAM performance already, and logic implies that excess helps feed the extra GPU's in crossfire.

 

[qubit]

the question was originally aimed @the54thvoid but also in a general manner, since i, most of the time, fail to see the real benefit of a SLI or CFX (and i had a GTX 580 Matrix Platinum SLI for a moment which i reverted to single card since then, 290 then 980 then ... time will tell. )

as for the performances of a 780 SLI is on par or slightly above my own 980 a pair of Ti's would be way sufficient to skip Maxwell indeed (if SLI CFX was really useful in the end ... scaling support and such trivial matter make it not so shiny imho)

Duh! You did indeed. I've lost the plot again.

I agree that generally single card is best for less hassle. You see, Scan saw me coming, because they knew it was one of those buy it now or lose it situations. If hadn't bought it, then I might have been tempted to get that Asus Strix 980 Ti that TPU reviewed or something, but I'm not that bothered really and am happy to wait for Pascal with my current setup.