AMD has officially revealed the Radeon R9 Nano in all its tiny glory. The mini-ITX graphics card is packing some incredible hardware into its short length, but it’s certainly not going to be easy on your wallet. After months of rumours and speculation, AMD has announced the R9 Nano will be retailing for an eye-watering $649. This is the same price as the full fat Radeon R9 Fury X, and $100 more expensive than the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury.
Essentially, AMD is charging the same price as the Fury X for a product that delivers lesser performance. The thinking behind it is that its small size makes it a unique proposition. There’s a few mini-ITX GTX 970’s from various graphics card manufacturers out there, but nothing with the level of performance the R9 Nano offers.
As we knew already, R9 Nano comes packing the full Fiji core seen on the Fury X. This means 4096 shaders, 64 compute units, 256 TMUs and 64 ROPs, joined by 4GB of HBM on a massive 4096-bit memory interface. Other than size the only tangible difference is in clock speed. The R9 Fury X is clocked at 1050 MHz, while the R9 Nano has a variable clock rate up to 1000 MHz. Essentially, however, the R9 Fury is a fully enabled Fiji GPU.
In comparison to AMD’s previous flagship, the Radeon R9 290X, you can expect a 30 per cent boost in performance. This has all been achieved despite a drop down to just 175W TDP, 100W less than the 275W consumed by the Fury X.
Performance benchmarks released by AMD seem great so far, though obviously they have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Up against the GTX 970 mITX, the R9 Nano gives it the runaround. Shadow of Mordor in particular sees huge gains on the tiny card, which is no doubt due to the high bandwidth memory on offer. AMD tout a 30% lead in performance over the GTX 970, but it comes at double the cost.
The performance of the card and its size is all well and and good then, but it’s the price that’s going to prove the most controversial. Many felt this was a huge opportunity for AMD to land a body blow on Nvidia with a great price to performance GPU, but AMD is undoubtedly targeting the ultra-enthusiast tier with this. At $649 the R9 Nano is the same price as the Fury X and the GTX 980 Ti, both cards which can comfortably exceed its performance at 4K resolution.
For mini-ITX builds this could well be a beast of a card, but in truth there are plenty of mITX cases out there which can house much larger graphics cards. For those after premium small form factor builds it could be a winner, but it’s never going to offer the best bang for your buck.]
Are you think of picking an R9 Nano up? Or is it a little too expensive for your tastes? Let us know what you make of AMD's latest!
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