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It is not a secret that AMD’s upcoming Radeon R9 Nano graphics card will be the most powerful adapter for mini-ITX personal computers ever produced and will have no rivals for quite some time. As it appears, the Radeon R9 Nano will not only offer high performance, but it will actually offer compute performance that will be comparable to that of AMD’s flagship Radeon R9 Fury X.
The AMD Radeon R9 Nano graphics card – which sales are expected to begin in the coming weeks – is based on the fully fledged code-named “Fiji” graphics processing unit with 4096 stream processors, 256 texture mapping units, 64 raster operations pipelines and 4096-bit memory interface, according to slide from AMD’s presentation published by VideoCardz web-site. The graphics board will continue to carry 4GB of HBM [high-bandwidth memory] operating at 1000MHz.
The miniature graphics card from AMD and its partners will have clock-rates comparable to those of the flagship Radeon R9 Fury X. The Radeon R9 Nano will have compute performance of around 8.2TFLOPS, which is only 5 per cent below that of the Radeon R9 Fury X. Actual performance of the Radeon R9 Nano will be considerably higher than that of the Radeon R9 Fury, which uses a cut-down version of “Fiji” with 3584 stream processors, and will be very close to that of the top-of-the-range product.
Thermal design power of the AMD Radeon R9 Nano will be 175W. Many small form-factor personal computers these days can cool-down such graphics cards. Makers of high-performance systems will likely release SFF PCs featuring the Radeon R9 Nano with extreme performance in games in the coming months. Moreover, thanks to the fact that the “Fiji” graphics processor supports hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding of H.265 (HEVC) video, the Radeon R9 Nano can even be used to playback of ultra-high-definition video. Unfortunately, since “Fiji” does not support HDMI 2.0 output, it may not be the best card to build home-theater personal computers for Ultra HD Blu-ray playback.
Pricing of AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano is unknown. Its performance is clearly higher than that of the AMD Radeon R9 Fury, which costs $549, but the product is not as fast as the Radeon R9 Fury X, which retails for $649.
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KitGuru Says: Keeping in mind that far not all people, even among enthusiasts, like liquid-cooling systems, the Radeon R9 Nano may actually become more popular than the Radeon R9 Fury X. The Radeon 9 Nano will be truly unique and it has all chances to become a best-seller.
It’s so tiny o:
Would really love it in a mini build, but I wonder how much they will price it :/
wooow 5% below Fury X
ayyyy
You would hope that it would e cheaper than a Fury X as there isn’t the cost of the water cooler.
Little chance of a game changing price, so a marvel for rich HTPC builders and small form factor LAN PC’s only.
Like the rest of the fury range, over priced for what you get, performance wise.
F U R Y N A N O
Fury Nano will live or die based on it’s pricing. I pray AMD gets a win on this one, they sure as hell can’t afford a flop.
I’m willing to bet it is a $500 card, it’s rumored power level and performance are close enough to GTX980. Honestly, there will be a premium attached to an otherwise supposedly cheaper card because it is small and uses less power than the other Fury’s, hence the possible high price. It isn’t going after GTX970 is the lower $300’s. That would make Grenada EOL too soon.
While the specs are unquestionably impressive, is there really a market for this? If we look at lan cases like those made by bit fenix, you can fit in larger cards, making this card a bit redundant. If it was half-height it could have made high end HTPC cases more appealing, but it isn’t, therefore is there really a market for gamers that require a tiny ITX footprint and yet massive power?
Why Fiji have only 4 ACEs and 2 HWSs (what is this?), compared to Carrizo/GCN 1.2, what have 8 ACEs and 0 HWS?
The thing i find funny about this card is that its target market is SFF systems with mini ITX boards- as far i am aware there aren’t any am3+ boards in that form factor so looks like they have thrown the towel in with regards to the cpu market.
Oh wait they are bringing out a couple more FM2+ chips !!! Yaaaayy… That isnt going to hold the Fury back at all in a SFF system…
Hurry up and bring Zen to the table, then you will have something to pair with your new GPUs
What is nice about small cards is that there are less components to fail and moreover, less weight on PCB won’t cause the card to bend. I have one GTX460 from Gainward that is this small and works perfectly fine and looks like new, in comparison my few years younger GTX560Ti is badly bent and after some time PCI-E contacts in my mobo lost its grip causing some nasty BSODS when I shake my case a bit. So yeah, I see a point in those tiny cards, keep that up AMD 🙂
I think in the Nano’s case the lower power consumption helps too, I’ve been considering an upgrade to a normal Fury but I’d need a new PSU too as my 550W wouldn’t cut it, that’s another £80 on top, where as a Nano I would be able to run without the need for a new PSU.
I agree with you in that I wish there were more low profile cards.
Supply, performance and it’s niche market status are major factors putting pressure on the price. Not sure if it’ll represent good value. Any price cuts from nvidia will depend on Nano supply and AMD’s own price cuts to 390X would depend on it as well. It’s a good thing supply will be limited or AMD might be in a bit of a pickle…
It sounds good, but can it play Arkham Knight?
Seeing how it is now a $650 card, I don’t know what to say.
Both have eight ACEs. What you see in the above diagram is the cores the ACE software runs on, since that’s a physical thing, while software is not.
Pretty shocking.
If your willing to spend over £500 on a gpu, surely you should be willing to spend a bit more on a psu? Plus, the consumption of maxwell is so low id imagine the ti falls in range of your current psu (600w)?
I’d go with, disappointing but not surprising.