AMD has now announced the smaller brother to the Fury X, the Fury (Non-X) that is available from two board partners only: Sapphire and ASUS; an AMD reference design is not available. Today, we are reviewing the ASUS R9 Fury Strix, which comes with the company's new triple-fan DirectCU III cooler.
I have to say I'm impressed by the Fury. It's the best AMD card I've reviewed in years, much better than I had anticipated.

Averaged over all our benchmarks we see a 7% performance lead over the reference GTX 980 at 1440p, which I'd recommend as the optimum resolution for the card. It's just not fast enough for 4K, and you certainly don't want to play 4K games at medium-low settings. For 4K gaming, you should at least go with the Fury X or GTX 980 Ti, or a CrossFire/SLI setup. Compared to the R9 390X, we see a decent 10% performance lead, and the difference to the Fury X is only 7%. However, due to the way Fiji scales in performance, I wouldn't pick it for 1920x1080 or lower as that is where the GTX 980 runs nearly as fast at much better pricing.
I'm a bit surprised by the lack of a factory-overclock on the ASUS R9 Fury Strix, even a few percent would have helped gain more ground over the GTX 980, which is crucial for this product's positioning.
In my opinion, 4 GB of HBM memory is the sweet-spot configuration for this market segment. It's enough for all the latest titles, and in our R9 390X 8 GB review, we've seen that extra memory provides no tangible benefits aside from increasing the price.

With only 68°C during heavy gaming, which is only 8°C more than the water-cooled Fury X, the new ASUS DirectCU III thermal solution does an excellent job at keeping the card cool. ASUS includes the idle fan-off feature on the R9 Fury STRIX, too, which makes for a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, something the Fury X can't do because its pump is always running and emitting a high-pitched whine. With 40 dBA, gaming noise is reasonable due to the large fans, and the noise quality is also better than on smaller fans. However, custom GTX 980 designs are much quieter at only a fraction of the noise as they go as low as a whisper-quiet 30 dBA. A great-looking backplate is also included.

Power consumption of the Fury is also improved over the Fury X because the water-cooling pump is gone. This puts the card on efficiency levels similar to NVIDIA's Maxwell-powered cards, although the GTX 980 is still more efficient. Multi-monitor desktop power consumption is finally improved too, something we've been complaining about for years.

Overclocking potential of the R9 Fury is slim, with only around 10%. The GTX 980 does much better here, which could be a deciding factor for overclocking-friendly people. AMD has disabled overclocking on their HBM memory chips, and while we're starting to see workarounds, the performance gains are not as big as what you could expect from overclocking GDDR5 memory. At the end of the day, a maximum-overclocked GTX 980 is going to be faster than a maximum-overclocked Fury.

The ASUS R9 Fury is expected to retail at around $579, which is a $30 premium over AMD's MSRP, which I feel is a bit high. Custom GTX 980 cards retail at around $520 and are both faster and quieter; the cheapest GTX 980 near-reference cards even go for as little as $480. However, if AMD can push the price of these cards down into the $520 to $530 range or below, the Fury could definitely compete with some GTX 980 cards. I also think the water-cooled Fury X is gonna be a tough sell over the Fury, a card that is nearly as fast without eating up the room a radiator would take or suffering from the watercooling pump's noise. I wish more AMD partners built R9 Fury cards because this SKU is definitely a better rounded package than the R9 Fury X.