The Fury vs. The Hydra: 2 Beastly Video Cards

I’ve owned my fair share of graphics cards in my day. However, two stand out as amazing cards, with varying experiences, strengths, and weaknesses. Never would I have thought that I would get to play with either card when I first built a computer, or really anything close to the performance these cards offer, both are a far cry from the modest 7870ghz edition that I started with. Both 250w+ beasts, both with stock water cooling, both with more GPU horsepower than I knew what to do with, and both a whole hell of a lot of fun. These beastly cards, the “fury” and the “hydra”, more commonly known as the Fury x and 295x2 respectively, are both great cards, but each in their own way.

A few summers back poking around on ebay I saw that the price of 295x2s were down, quite a bit. Compared to the launch price of 1500 dollars (far out of my reach) I now saw an opportunity to actually own a massive amount of GPU power, arguably more than my old 8350 could handle. With prices hovering in the 600-700 range, it was just as cheap to get a 295x2 as it was 2 used 290x. The advantage here, however, was the inclusion of water cooling, offering a much more reasonable option for keeping all 500w of heat out of my case. That was really big in the decision, even though the Fractal Design Define R5 is a very versatile, dissipating what would be close to, if not more than, 700w of heat with air cooling is far outside of its intended use. With the ability to vent nearly 500w of that heat straight out of the case, and for the same price as a dual air cooling setup, I was sold. I started watching auctions, and managed to buy a card for the low low price of $602.50. The card had only ever been used in a demo/show build, never actually even had a game run on it, came with all the original packaging, accessories, information, everything, even the plastic caps for the video ports and the pci-e cover! What a steal!
I immediately started playing with the card, putting it through it’s paces. This wasn’t my first rodeo with crossfire, so I knew about all the issues and how to avoid as many of them as possible. The only real issue I encountered with the card was temperature. With the stock fan, not only did I have no control over the speed, it really isn't a great fan for radiators. I also struggled with finding a good place to put the rad, as I was originally opposed to removing one of the moduvents on the top since I wanted to keep noise to a minimum. In the end I settled on keeping the rad on the ceiling and removing one of the top panels, as well as putting some Gentle Typhoon fans I had laying around on the rad in a push pull config. After that, I had zero issues with temperatures.

After sorting out those basic issues, I had a card with massive GPU horsepower running pretty cool with relatively quiet performance. Any game I threw at the 295x2, it could handle at 1080p with ease. It even performed pretty damn well at  simulated near 4k using VSR. The card was an absolute beast, but a beast with troubles. Obviously, the usual complaints about crossfire were there. Micro stuttering, lack of support in certain games, issues with performance and scaling. Even with all these issues the experience was great, in most cases a few modifications to some settings, driver tweaks, patches, etc. would fix a large majority of the issues. However, there was one game that drove me up a wall trying to optimize, The Witcher 3. No matter what, that damn game did NOT want to run well with crossfire. Frametimes were horrible, micro stutters were not just common, but prevalent, all kinds of issues. The crimson driver updates did a lot to help here, especially with the shader cache addition, but the problems were still there, although less noticeable. I was always scrambling for performance, with that much horsepower (more than the 980ti or Titan X) I felt I was missing out on a ton of performance, even with less than perfect scaling. I tried different driver settings with tessellation, game mods, patches to the game with updated windows 10 features for my windows 8.1 install, anything I could to get more performance. But it never came. Obviously other games fared better, and some worse. GTA V was another situation where performance should have been better, but in many cases my performance was far below where it “should” have been. Even for an enthusiast, eventually it became tiresome always having to tweak settings both in game and in drivers to get the best I could out of my card, or even acceptable performance. But for the money, the performance was incredible, a price I was more than willing to pay.

The Fury X has been in many ways similar, and in others different. Learning from my experience with the 295x2, I knew to mount the radiator on the top, and the included fan was much better out the gate. The stock fan on the Fury X rad is very obviously designed to be similar to the infamous Gentle Typhoons, if not a direct re-brand, and also features fan control, allowing for a much more tweakable experience. At stock, the card is quieter than the 295x2 ever was, while keeping temperatures much lower. Unlike many other users, I never had issues with coil whine or pump noise, although some of that may be due to the soundproofing in the R5, or me simply not being aware of the noise or sensitive to it. Either way, the card performs admirably at incredibly low temperatures. Of course, not being a crossfire setup, all of the issues with scaling, micro stutters, and support in games are gone, and a single Fury X offers a large jump in performance over a single 290x. With the launch of the Fury X following the launch of the crimson drivers not only were the typical crossfire issues gone, but many driver related issues were also absent. I received my Fury X far after launch, meaning that the driver situation had only improved. Performance in my go to game, The Witcher 3, was lightyears ahead of the experience that I had with the 295x2. Everything was incredibly smooth, even before mods. Performance is actually so nice that I now have some mods on the game allowing me to run certain settings above ultra, all with VSR set to 1440p. The game looks amazing with all these settings cranked up with the higher resolution, and even with all of the mods the performance is on par with the 295x2, and the experience is light years ahead. GTA V, while no longer suffering from stutters and other crossfire related issues however suffered in the performance department. While I can't be sure, since I can't do a cross comparison, I almost feel like the 295x2 performed better and was an overall better experience. As far as tinkering with settings and drivers goes, the Fury X feels less complex, less of a hassle. From start to finish the Fury X is a much more polished and professional experience, while still offering great performance.

One aspect of hardware that appeals greatly to me, as well as plenty of other enthusiasts, is overclocking. I LOVE overclocking hardware, CPU, GPU, it doesn't matter to me. Free performance is the best kind of performance, and getting some extra performance per dollar is a great thing to me. The overclocking experience on both of these cards, despite their similarities, is very different. I received both cards well after initial issues with overclocking had been overcome, and was able to really jump in and go with either of the cards without much hassle. Both offer BIOS modding for extra performance, and both have very slight, very annoying nuances with the overclocking. Really, the overclocking the 295x2 is more akin to overclocking a Fury Nano rather than Fury X. The primary limiting factor on the 295x2 once temperature was sorted is very obviously the power limit. No matter the temperatures, the physical limits of the dual 8-pin power connector and the power limit of the card really prevented any kind of overvolting to push the card further. As I understand it, this limit could be partially overcome with some BIOS modding, however I never felt the need to mod my 295x2 for extra performance. There simply weren't any compelling cases to. It either ran the games I wanted to play with performance to spare or suffered from crossfire related issues, ie. something that BIOS mods would not solve. The Fury X, on the other hand, is a completely different beast. With more than adequate cooling, as well as plenty of potential power for the chip, there is plenty of OC headroom. While early overclocking was disappointing at best, BIOS mods have increased the ability of the end user to squeeze extra performance dramatically. BIOS modded Fury X running North of 1200 are not uncommon, and that’s no small boost to clock speed or performance. I’ve not modded my Fury X yet, but the day may be coming. There are plenty of situations where this card stands to gain from overclocking, as many of the issues are not crossfire related, but rather horsepower related. The extra bump in clock speed could be the difference between a stable 60fps or a game dropping into the low 50s or 40s. The big drawback here is the power needed to push these chips the extra distance. On BIOS modded Fury x cards, it’s not uncommon to see over 100mv over stock, or even higher. All that extra power dumps a lot more heat into the loop, specifically impacting the VRM temperature. Keeping the VRM cool is a huge art of stability with that kind of voltage offset, and this become the primary challenge in pushing the card. There is, however, a huge potential gain in performance, especially given the direct scaling of an overclock on a single GPU system.

The other main task my desktop performs is mining, something I’m always sure to start before I leave my desk to go to class, sleep, or really anytime I'm not using my computer. There is no contest here, the 295x2 wipes the floor with the Fury X. It comes down to computer power here, and the 295x2 has a whole lot more of it. For Ethereum mining the 295x2 pulled down an incredible 60mh/s, compared to the 32mh/s I’ve been managing with a slightly overclocked Fury X. Another interesting point here is the difference in the platform for mining. As far as the 200, 300, or 400 series is concerned, maxing memory speed and lowering clock speed/voltage is the best way to go. All of my RX480s run 1100/2200+ with -88mv or lower, whereas my Fury X is running 1160/500 with a +6mv offset. The secret sauce behind this is the HBM. With the dagger-hashimoto algorithm, memory speed is king, and there’s nothing faster than HBM. Overclocking the memory also doesn't matter, because the GPU can't actually feed the memory fast enough, even with an overclock. Where my memory controller load is always higher than 90% on my RX480s, mining ETH I’ve never seen the Fury X even crack 50%. Some of this comes down to a lack of optimization, some of it stems for the incredibly fast memory. For every 1% boost to clock speed I’ve added, I’ve observed a 1% boost in ETH performance, suggesting that the performance could scale quite well. Even with perfect scaling, there is no chance in hell the Fury X could catch the 295x2 here.

The other important fact to note here is that my system is in many regards far from modern, and in a lot of ways probably a really bad platform to run such high powered GPU on. For both systems I’ve run a good old 8350 with 16gb of 1866mhz ram, with varying overclocks as I’ve tweaked and tinkered with settings. The typical speed for my processor for both of these cards has floated between 4.6ghz and 4.8ghz. The 295x2 probably enjoyed a higher average clock speed for its duration, but not by much, at least not over the average life of both of the cards. Any way you slice it, 4.8ghz or 4.0ghz, the 8350 has never been the king of the hill when it comes to gaming performance, and it suffers even more heavily in crossfire setups. At this point, with the chip nearing 5 years old, there are plenty of titles where the chip is not only beginning to show its age but really compared to newer offering struggle. It’s not uncommon for me to see pentium chips performing in the same ballpark as my system (with similar GPU, of course). So realistically, a lot of the problems that I experienced with the 295x2 could have been caused by this aging system, specifically in the 2 earlier mentioned titles, Witcher 3 and GTA V. Both have shown a preference for fast single threaded, high performance CPU, neither of which the 8350 really falls into. Even with the aging system, both cards performed (and in the case of the Fury X continues to perform) extraordinarily well.

Both cards have been a great experience, and I’ve learned a great deal from both. With both cards hovering around the 300-350 dollar range on ebay as of 04/13/17, both offer incredible value. If I had to recommend one for the average user or gamer, the recommendation would hands down go to the Fury X. However, if a user doesn’t mind tweaking some settings a bit, messing with some undervolting/cooling changes, and is aware of common crossfire issues, I would have no problem recommending the 295x2. For 330 bucks I honestly don't think there is a better performing card, period. The 295x2 would hands down be the recommendation for anything needing massive amounts of GPU power as well, something like scientific work or cryptography, or even crypto mining. Both cards feature what I think is an amazing cooling solution, although opinions will vary here, as not everyone is on board with AIO water cooling, especially not on video cards. I really think designs featuring at least a hybrid solution are the future though, and comparing an overclocked Fury X in terms of performance and noise to an overclocked 980ti it the advantages of water cooling become painfully clear. In the battle of the beasts, there can be only one winner. For me, the Fury x comes out on top. While it may not offer the same massive raw performance, or same hash rate for mining, the overall performance of the Fury X is not far behind. In games where crossfire is a problem, the 295x2 suffers, where the Fury X is still fine. The 295x2 is louder, hotter, and requires more attention, and benefits less from overclocking, although it also features more computer power and really doesn't need to be overclocked. Mining performance can easily be written off, as to my thinking if you want to focus on GPU performance in that regard you’re better off just buying a RX480 and putting that in your system beside a more powerful card, or building a dedicated rig. The advantages of the 295x2 are slowly but surely dwindling, and with no large scale shift in the trends regarding crossfire in sight, it is a hard recommendation, but if you want the absolute best band for your buck, there is only one option, and it is the 295x2.