 |
|||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||
Today AMD is releasing the highly anticipated Radeon R9 Nano, the world’s most powerful compact Mini-ITX friendly graphics card. On paper the Nano is essentially a pint-sized Fury X, which sounds amazing, but the big question is how well does it perform? AMD’s paper launch a few weeks ago suggested performance was excellent and finally we get the chance to find out for ourselves... Over the past few months AMD has been focusing their efforts on the high-end GPU fight with their ‘Fiji’ line up. The Radeon R9 Fury X lead the charge on June 24th armed with 4096 stream processors and AMD’s cutting edge high-bandwidth memory technology (HBM for short). Priced at $649 the Fury X is AMD’s most expensive single-GPU graphics card yet and yes we feel GPU pricing has gotten out of hand, likely thanks to anyone who has bought a variant of the Titan. Priced alongside the GTX 980 Ti, the Fury X delivered competitive performance and thanks to its compact design using a liquid cooler it also runs much cooler. Yet despite that the GTX 980 Ti is a significantly better overclocker, netting more than 20% extra performance, which is why it got the nod in our recent multi-GPU performance article. Less than a month after announcing the Fury X a second high-end Fiji GPU was unveiled, known simply as the Fury. Dropping the X meant 13% fewer stream processors and texture units were available, while the liquid cooler was dumped for a more traditional heatpipe cooler, albeit a massive one. The Fury featured a reduced MSRP of $550, so in other words 15% off.  Despite 13% fewer stream processors the Fury was on average just 5% slower than the Fury X, creating a GTX Titan X/GTX 980 Ti situation, in other words the Fury X had become a bit pointless. Although the Fury X was released over 2 months ago now, buying one today is still next to impossible. Huge online retailers such as newegg.com have been out of stock for weeks now and only show models from Sapphire, Asus and VisionTek. That said the Fury can be purchased though just two models exist, the Asus R9 Fury STRIX and Sapphire R9 Fury Tri-X OC. Meanwhile there are more than three dozen GTX 980 examples to choose from and around two dozen GTX 980 Ti’s from half a dozen board partners. Despite the lack of supply AMD is moving forward with yet another Fiji based GPU model. The new Radeon R9 Nano is perhaps the most interesting Fiji GPU yet. In fact the Nano could be the very reason why you haven’t been able to buy a Fury X for weeks now. AMD says the Nano is a sort of co-flagship product with the R9 Fury X and therefore has given the Nano the same $650 MSRP. AMD has said it is “saving up quantities” of the Nano ahead of its launch in the hope that supply will be sufficient to meet demand. Based on the fully fledged Fiji XT the Nano gets the same 4096 stream processors as the Fury X, just in a much more compact package. The Nano measures just 6” (152mm) long, which is made possible by the Fiji GPU's modest power consumption and HBM technology. AMD hopes to enable 4K gaming in tiny Mini-ITX systems with the Nano. The fact that all 4096 stream processors are enabled is quite shocking but what’s more shocking is the TDP rating of just 175w, which is 100 watts less than the Fury X. It is expected that the Nano will keep power consumption and temperatures in check through relaxed voltages and frequencies when compared to the Fury X. |
|||||
|
|
ProX |
Posted on: 09/11/2015 12:16 AM
Great looking card but that price :S |
|
Stickman |
Posted on: 09/14/2015 09:37 AM
The rear power connector makes this as long as the FuryX anyway so what is the point? |