Following reports yesterday of leaked specs AMD has officially announced the AMD Radeon R9 Nano, a tiny, 6-inch long graphics card that’s nearly as powerful as the Fury X.
Sporting the same 4096 graphics cores as AMD’s flagship graphics card, the Fury X, the R9 Nano is reported to have around 70% the performance despite being so small.
Most graphics cards of this power are around 10inches long so they’re only able to fit in larger computer chassis. The Nano, though, will easily fit into the vast majority of mini-ITX cases or smaller.
The Fury X is small as well, at only 7.5 inches long, but it also incorporates a large separate radiator for its liquid cooler. The R9 Nano, though, sports a simple air cooler.
To keep the thermal output of the card in check AMD has throttled the maximum clock speed of the AMD Fiji processor to 1000MHz. This is only 50MHz slower than the Fury X but it’s likely the card will not reach this speed all that often – something that’s reflected in the reported 30% difference in performance.
It’s also the case that the card will run much hotter, though not as hot as you might expect. While some cards can hit 85+ degrees Celsius (and indeed that’s the thermal cut off point of this card) typical operating temperature should be 75 degrees. This is something that’s reflected in the rated TDP, with the Nano rated at 175W – that’s 100W lower than the Fury X.
This reduction in clock speed also allows AMD to require just one eight-pin PCIe connector to power the card, again making it more suitable for smaller cases with smaller power supplies.
Related: Intel Optane explained
Otherwise the two cards are identical, sporting the same 4GB of HBM memory accessed via a 4096-bit interface. None of the chip has been disabled so it has the full compliment of 256 texture units and 64 ROPs, as well as those 4096 stream processor cores.
All this performance means the card won’t be cheap, with AMD currently putting the same $649 MSRP on the R9 Nano as on the R9 Fury X. However it remains to be seen exactly how much shops will charge.
The worldwide AMD Radeon R9 Nano release date is set at 10th September.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
