I Gave Up Waiting On The Water-Cooled Radeon R9 Fury X

One week after the Radeon R9 Fury X launched at $649 USD with an integrated water-cooling solution, the graphics card remains in short supply and it's not clear when exactly this graphics card will better saturate retail channels. At this point, I've shifted my focused to the air-cooled AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics card that will ship in two weeks and be air-cooled while costing $100 less.

While I pre-ordered a Radeon R9 Fury X, it's still not clear when they will be in sufficient supplies. I ended up canceling my order today for the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury X today, given that it's no longer even showing in the R9 Fury X product listings on Amazon.com. Up to now the Sapphire R9 Fury X was listed there at $649 and was the "#1 new release in computer graphics cards", but now it's not even listed. As of writing, listed now as the number one new release in graphics cards is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

Of the Radeon R9 Fury X still listed on Amazon is the XFX R9 Fury at $667 and estimated shipping in one to three months. The only other Amazon listing for the R9 Fury X is the Visiontek graphics card at $682 with an estimated ship time in two to four weeks.

Over on NewEgg, all of their Radeon R9 Fury X graphics cards are too out of stock. They also no longer list their combo purchase bundles as mentioned in the previous article on Phoronix about the Fury X purchase headaches.

With these factors, it's really not worth waiting on the Fury X $649+ GPU when on 14 July the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury is expected to be released on 14 July and will cost $549+... Of course, here's to hoping that this Fiji PRO graphics card will have better availability than the Fury X. The other factor driving me to wait to buy the cheaper Radeon R9 Fury for Linux review/benchmarking at Phoronix is that AMD hasn't even released a supported Catalyst Linux driver yet and no open-source driver support is imminent ahead of the R9 Fury launch.

Thus hopefully in about two weeks when this new graphics card launches I'll have up Linux benchmarks of this Fiji GPU with High Bandwidth Memory, assuming Linux drivers are out in time and they work half-way decent with modern OpenGL/OpenCL workloads.