CONCLUSION

   The Radeon R9 Fury and Fury X lines of graphics cards by AMD were always ment to “counter” the GeForce GTX 980 and 980 Ti models by NVIDIA and judging by our charts the Radeon R9 Fury STRIX does exactly that, at least in terms of performance. The Inno3D GeForce GTX 980 iChill Ultra 4GB does come ontop on most tests but the Radeon R9 Fury STRIX does come really close in all the others. Once again we see a Radeon card use more power than its competition although 16W more compared to the Inno3D GeForce GTX 980 iChill Ultra 4GB under load is certainly not much and i doubt it will be enough to make most consumers look for something else. On the bright side noise levels are not very high (the fans are disabled until the card gets to over 65 degrees so you can enjoy 0dB while not in games) so compared to factory Radeon R9 Fury cards the Fury STRIX is a definite step towards the right direction. It goes without saying that we’d all like to see higher OC potential but we really can’t complain about the performance of this card.

   10 months after launch the price of the ASUS Radeon R9 Fury STRIX (STRIX-R9FURY-DC3-4G) hasn’t really dropped so it currently retails for USD559.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 579Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk). At the same time similar performance GeForce GTX 980 cards retail for roughly USD80/70Euros less, are slightly faster (equally good custom design models)  and use less power so overall I’d say they offer more bang for your buck. In the end however we can’t deny that the Radeon R9 Fury STRIX by ASUS is a great card and worthy of our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Excellent Build Quality
- Top Performance
- Design (For Some)
- DirectCU III Cooling System (Low Temperatures & Noise Levels)
- HDMI v1.4a / 3x DisplayPort / DVI-I
- 4GB High Bandwidth Memory (HBM)

CONS

- Size (300mm Long)
- Price (Compared To The GeForce GTX 980)
- Power Consumption