Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , July 13, 2015
Author:
Brent Justice
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MSI R9 390X GAMING vs ASUS STRIX R9 Fury Review

We are going to re-test the $429 MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G video card with the new Catalyst 15.7 driver and compare it directly to the $579 ASUS STRIX R9 Fury DC3 video card with Catalyst 15.7. We think this video card will put the entire Radeon Fury line in a perspective we did not see coming, but you should know about.

Introduction

We are about to put the new AMD Radeon R9 Fury series in some perspective. In this evaluation we think you will have a bigger picture and understanding of the AMD Radeon R9 Fury in context with other products in AMD's current lineup of video cards.

AMD Radeon R9 390X - $429

On June 18th the launch of AMD's Radeon R7 and R9 300 series was upon us. We debuted that launch with our evaluation of MSI's R9 390X GAMING 8G video card retailing for $429.

The AMD Radeon R9 390X is a re-branding or refreshing of the AMD Radeon R9 290X video card based on Hawaii GCN 1.1 architecture. The new re-brand brought with it an upgrade to a standard 1050MHz GPU clock speed, 6GHz memory speed and standard 8GB of VRAM all for $429. The MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G video card boosted the clock speed to 1100MHz GPU clock and 6.1GHz memory clock out-of-the-box but at the same AMD MSRP pricing of $429, i.e. no premium for this extra clock speed.

We originally evaluated this video card and followed up with overclocking performance. We found it to be a capable video card, improving upon the AMD Radeon R9 290X in many ways. It brought competition closer to the GeForce GTX 980.

AMD Radeon R9 Fury - $549

That was of course until the AMD Radeon R9 Fury (non-X) launched just last week on July 10th. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury is based on AMD's new Fiji GPU and GCN 1.2 architecture. It has upgraded features and specifications, making it the most architecturally relevant and current GPU AMD has at the moment. With the upgraded specifications this $549 MSRP GPU competes well with the GeForce GTX 980 on performance.

The ASUS STRIX R9 Fury DC3 retail video card we evaluated comes with reference clock speeds out-of-the-box and customized hardware with a price premium with a MSRP of $579. In our evaluation it did well against the competition in terms of performance, only lacking by its overpriced nature.

Radeon R9 390X vs Radeon R9 Fury

In that evaluation, after we had a chance to process our evaluation performance we realized that the performance didn't took too different from our evaluation of the MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G video card evaluation. We discovered that the gameplay experience and performance looked oddly similar at first glance.

When we were sent the MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G video card AMD had available its driver packaging version 15.15, not to be confused with the catalyst version. However, by the time AMD was ready to have its Radeon R9 Fury evaluated a newer driver was ready and provided to press, driver packaging version 15.20, otherwise known as Catalyst 15.7. In our testing we found this driver had improved performance on the Radeon R9 Fury. We of course used it in our evaluation.

We decided that a re-test was in order with the MSI R9 GAMING 8G video card in light of this new driver and in light of our discovery that the gameplay experience was similar. We needed to specifically compare these two video cards both based on the exact same updated and newer driver and see how performance compared. If the driver improved performance on the AMD Radeon R9 Fury series, it also might on the Radeon R9 390X.

This evaluation today is all about the MSI R9 GAMING 8G video card with Catalyst 15.7 compared directly to the ASUS STRIX R9 Fury with Catalyst 15.7. With the new driver in use we can get to the bottom of performance between these two video cards and see just how close these perform.

Pricing Difference

Keep in mind the MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G video card is $429 and the ASUS STRIX R9 Fury DC3 is $579 (we have yet to see retail availability), a difference of $150. Even compared to AMD's reference suggested pricing of $549 a large gap exists between the Radeon R9 390X and AMD Radeon R9 Fury on pricing. The question is will the performance difference reflect that gap in pricing?

We are evaluating both video cards out-of-box, with no changes, default clock speeds the cards ship at. The MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G retails for $429, same as the reference AMD Radeon R9 390X, so we see no need to lower the clock speed on it. The ASUS STRIX R9 Fury DC3 is also at its default out-of-box clock speeds which again retails for $579 as is.