AMD Radeon R9 Fury records mouthwatering performance when overclocked

Scorpus

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An enthusiast overclocker over on the HWBot forums has managed to push an AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics card to its absolute limits thanks to liquid nitrogen cooling and a collection of hardware and software mods.

The user by the name of Xtreme Addict started out with an Asus Radeon R9 Fury Strix, featuring a cut-down version of the fully-enabled Fiji GPU seen on R9 Fury X cards. He then used previously reported tools to unlock the Fury's disabled compute units, essentially turning the card into a Fury X with a full 4096 shader cores.

To push the R9 Fury to its limits, the user first needed to perform a series of hardware voltage mods that, judging by the photos of the finished product, definitely aren't for the faint-hearted. He then slapped on a liquid nitrogen cooler, flashed a BIOS that allowed extreme overclocking, and got to work.

Xtreme Addict managed to push the card from a stock core clock of 1000 MHz all the way up to 1450 MHz, which is an impressive 45% increase in clock speeds. What's even more impressive is how far he managed to push the card's High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), achieving a final memory clock of 1000 MHz, which is double the HBM's stock 500 MHz clock.

With the card sitting at these insane clock speeds, cooled with liquid nitrogen, a score of 10,033 was recorded in 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme benchmark. Considering the card posted a score of 6,237 at stock speeds, this represents a whopping 61% increase in performance.

A full guide detailing how to achieve this sort of performance from an R9 Fury is available over on the HWBot forums, although the process is quite lengthy and isn't recommended for anyone but the most hardcore of overclockers.

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In two years time, if not less a stock clocked mid range card costing a quarter, if not less (again) of the price of the Fury will embarrass that 3DMark score but that's not what counts, the fun was getting it.
 
In two years time, if not less a stock clocked mid range card costing a quarter, if not less (again) of the price of the Fury will embarrass that 3DMark score but that's not what counts, the fun was getting it.
If that were true than the 780 would be twice as fast as the 680 and the 980 would be twice as fast as the 780. I'm not as familiar with AMD's line up, but I'm sure the same can be said for them. Essentially the next gen $700 graphics cards will have similar performance to this OC'd card and the generation after that they'll be in the $400 range.

However, none of that is the point here. This guy didn't do it because he wanted better gaming on it, he did it simply because he could. And that, my friend, is arguably more important.

I for one love to see modders do extremely ridiculous mods that have no practical use at all.
 
If that were true than the 780 would be twice as fast as the 680 and the 980 would be twice as fast as the 780. I'm not as familiar with AMD's line up, but I'm sure the same can be said for them. Essentially the next gen $700 graphics cards will have similar performance to this OC'd card and the generation after that they'll be in the $400 range.

However, none of that is the point here. This guy didn't do it because he wanted better gaming on it, he did it simply because he could. And that, my friend, is arguably more important.

I for one love to see modders do extremely ridiculous mods that have no practical use at all.
I stated in my post that he did it for the kick he got out of it. Next week his record will probably be broken. Aren't records there to be broken?
 
All cards can be modded. But it's not worth the time or effort for almost everyone.
 
HBM might just save AMD.
I am still going to call it RAM stacking :p .

Nvidia is already planning to use 2nd gen HBM (more than 4gb max) in their next cards. It's not AMD only. There are reports from early this year, even power points that were used.

HBM probably wasn't used to avoid the delay of release.

If AMD/ATI (if rumors are true and they split), can keep riding the wave of Nvidia failings in drivers and power control issues, while not following in their footsteps... AMD should start seeing more profits.
 
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