Samo Fury X, Fury i Nano su zapravo potpuno nove kartice, dok ostala nova 300 serija ipak se pokazuje kao rebrand stare.
There's not one, not two, but three brand new high-end graphics cards on the way from AMD. As rumoured, AMD is dropping the numerical branding and is instead grouping its top cards under the "Fury" banner. All are based on its new Fiji chip, which is a tweaked version of the company's long-standing GCN architecture, and—as expected—all will come equipped with 4GB of stacked, on-package high bandwidth memory (HBM).
The flagship is the $649 R9 Fury X, which launches on June 24. At that price, it is pitched directly against Nvidia's GTX 980 Ti. It features 4096 stream processors—a huge jump over the 2816 stream processors found in the R9 290X—"up to" 1050MHz core clock, 256 texture units, 64 ROPs, HBM memory with 512 GB/s of bandwidth, a 67.2 GP/s pixel fill rate, and a six-phase VRM (voltage regulator module), which AMD claims is ideal for overclocking the card. We don't yet have UK pricing, but it'll probably be around £550.
Despite using two 8-pin power connectors, the Fury X's power consumption isn't as high as some feared: the TDP is 275W, just a tad higher than the R9 290X's, although it's worth bearing in mind that in real-world usage, the R9 290X was much closer to 300W. The Fury X supports up to 375W of power for overclocking.
AMD's reference cooler has gotten a makeover, with the company finally ditching the less-than-ideal plastic blower design of older cards. The Fury X's cooler is made of die cast aluminium and finished in a black nickel gloss and a soft touch black. It's quite a handsome thing, and thanks to the use of HBM memory AMD has been able to shrink the size of the card down to just a hair over 19cm (7.5in), which is all the more impressive given the huge die made up of 8.9 billion transistors. However, that doesn't take into account the watercooling tubes, which poke out of the rear of the card. Speaking of watercooling, the Fury X is cooled via an extremely thick 120mm radiator, rated for up to 500W of cooling.
Bling comes in the form of a light-up Radeon logo on the top of the card, as well an LED light strip that indicates the current level of GPU operation. Users can choose between either red or blue, while a separate green LED lights up when the card is idling and not making use of any GPU cores. For hooking up monitors, there are three full-size DisplayPort outputs, along with a single HDMI 1.4 port.
Updated: Other sites are reporting that it's HDMI 2.0. We're trying to confirm one way or the other with AMD.
Next up is the $549 R9 Fury, an air-cooled version of the Fury X. Specs are thin on the ground for regular Fury, but it appears to feature the same aluminium construction as the Fury X along with a blower-style fan for venting hot air directly out of the case. It's likely that the Fury will drop some stream processors and ROPs compared to the Fury X, but we'll have to wait until we hear something official from AMD to get confirmation.
The third card is an odd one. Called the R9 Nano, it too is based on the Fiji chip with HBM, but comes in at just 15cm/6in, a size usually reserved for low-end cards. There's a large fan on the side for venting air inside a PC case, and AMD claims the R9 Nano offer ups to two times the performance-per-watt over the R9 290X; higher than the improvement offered by the Fury and Fury X. No pricing was given for the R9 Nano, but it is supposed to launch "this summer."
There's also supposed to be a dual-GPU configuration of the Fury X on the way, AMD gave no additional details.
AMD did, however, unveil a rather mad-looking PC equipped with dual Fury X graphics cards. Called Project Quantum, it's a unique small form factor PC split into two sections, with the middle lit up by a set of glowing red LEDs. Other than the dual Fury X GPUs, AMD isn't talking about what else lies inside the PC, but we did spot a rather huge external PSU being used to power it. Sadly, you won't actually be able to go and buy the PC, at least for now: AMD is currently pitching the design to partners in order to bring it to market, but has no time frame for release.
For those who don't need quite so much graphics horsepower, AMD also revealed some updates to the R9 and R7 graphics card ranges. Sadly, the new 300-series is a rebrand of the older 200-series cards, and sport almost identical specs, bar an increased amount of memory. At the bottom is the R7 360, which comes equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 memory for $109; the R9 370 with up to 4GB of GDDR5 memory for $149; and the R9 380, also with up to 4GB of GDDR5 memory for $199. At the top end is R9 390 for $329 and the R9 390X for $429, both of which come with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. We're trying to hunt down some UK prices and will update the post when we have them.
