TOKYO: The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X sports some bleeding edge technology, like its High Bandwidth 3D stacked memory, and offers performance in the same class as NVIDIA’s powerful GeForce GTX 980 Ti.
AMD didn’t focus all of its efforts solely on the GPU powering the Radeon R9 Fury X, however. The company also put a lot of thought into the industrial design of the product. Many of AMD’s previous-gen flagship GPUs were outfitted with some great technology, but the cards themselves weren’t much to look at and featured tons of plastic. AMD’s main rival in the discrete GPU space, NVIDIA, however, had created an attractive high-end design language for its cards that has carried over for multiple generations. With the Fury X, AMD tried to achieve something similar. The cards are outfitted with black-nickel plated aluminum and soft-touch panels that give the Fury X a decidedly high-end feel.
AMD also made removal of the Fury X’s front panel as easy as disengaging a few screws. The company mentioned early on that it was toying with the idea of releasing the CAD models necessary for users to create their own custom front panels for the Fury X. And today it actually happened.
In a post on the AMD website titled, “Personalizing your AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card” a download link is provided for a 3D model that can be used to create customized front plates for the Fury X, either on a CNC machine or with a 3D Printer. From the post, “During the process of creating the industrial design for the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card we encountered a variety of unique perspectives within AMD on how it should look. These differentiating opinions made us think what if we could enable our customers to implement their own creativity on our design? To do this we incorporated a removable front plate on the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card to allow for customer creativity.”
The target audience for a high-end graphics card like the Fury X is relatively small. And in that group, the number of people able to create their own custom face plates is even smaller. But this is a good move on AMD’s part that will win it some fans in the PC modding community. It’ll also likely spur the release of unique face plate designs from PC accessory makers and allow AMD’s add-in board partners to better differentiate their products.
