AMD’s upcoming R9 Fury, the scaled back version of its flagship Fury X, has had its specifications leaked online. The only real difference between the pair on the internal side of things is a reduced number of stream processors, but the external tweaks are perhaps more noticeable. Gone is the built in water cooling block and pump. A traditional air cooler is in its place.
However, with our speculative hats on, we can take in that the R9 Fury supposedly comes with 3,584 stream processors, rather than the Fury X’s 4,096. It has the same 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) running at an effective 1GHz clock. The core is said to be architecturally identical to the Fury X, and clocked at 1,050MHz.
It will be interesting to see how well such a design is cooled, of course, since the fact AMD pushed for a liquid solution on the Fury X implied that a lot of heat needed to be dissipated with the design. We’ve been told that the standard Fury with its air cooling solution will operate at up to 75 degrees Celsius, which is about 50 percent warmer than that of its water cooled counterpart.
While hardly chilly, that would still be a solid achievement (as long as the fan wasn’t too noisy) as graphics cards of the past have regularly reached much higher temperatures while under heavy load. It’s especially noteworthy considering this GPU is expected to only be 10 to 15 percent slower than its liquid-cooled big brother.
This information is unofficial and based on comments from “industry insiders,” so it’s important not to take these as gospel. However, Tweaktown, the source of this leak, did correctly predict the official naming scheme of the new Fiji based cards. The numbers also make sense given that the R9 Fury is supposed to sell for $549 — $100 less than the R9 Fury X.
With a launch of the hardware expected sometime in the next few weeks, we can await an official announcement about the cards in the near future. Hopefully with pricing data.