AMD Radeon R9 Nano Launched Today: Is This A True Pocket Rocket?

Today AMD officially launched the greatly anticipated R9 Nano graphics card and we at PPSU have all the juicy specs we know you want…..

So lets start with the physical attributes of the card:

 

The R9 Nano has a PCB size of a tiny 6″ which is 40% shorter than the R9 290x making this a truly small card and fits onto a Mini ITX motherboard with ease:

AMD have specified a target temperature of 75c but the Nano will not thermal throttle until it hits 85c but those temperatures should be kept well in check thanks to the cooler AMD has on it which features a Vapor Chamber, Dual Heatpipes and even a dedicated heatpipe for the voltage regulators.

In terms of noise levels we are looking at a quoted figure of 42dBA which is some 16dBA quieter than the 290x and fits inline with most GPU’s on the market today.

The R9 Nano only requires a single 8-pin power connector and as such has a typical board power of 175w which puts it at using 30% less power than the R9 290x and gives it up to 2x the performance per watt and up to 2x performance density of the previous flagship.

Speaking of performance it seems like AMD have thrown everyone a bit of a curveball here:

That’s right, the R9 Nano features the FULL Fiji XT GPU from the Fury X flagship meaning it has a whopping 4096 stream processors with a clock speed up to 1000Mhz with 4GB of HBM at 500Mhz on a 4096-bit bus all adding up to 8.19 TFLOPs of compute performance making it up to 30% faster than the R9 290x, Seriously impressive specs from such a tiny card.

As you can see here in AMD’s own benchmarks the Nano is quite potent beating out the highest performing mITX card in the Nvidia camp the GTX 970 mITX at 4k resolution at a reasonable framerate, in fact AMD’s own project quantum we all saw during the AMD Live 30 event was actually powered by two of these little monsters.

While the R9 Nano has the same styling cues as the Fury X AMD will not be locking this card to reference only, Board partners will be allowed to design and make their own versions of the card which is good news for everyone out there with 4k TV’s seeing as unfortunately the Nano follows the same I/O design as the Fury X and does not support HDMI 2.0 (although AMD tells us DP-HDMI 2.0 dongles will be available soon).

AMD’s main focus with the R9 Nano was to create a high end graphics card for gamers who wanted the smaller form factor but didn’t want to compromise on performance and based on specs alone this looks like it could be a winner.
The R9 Nano is expected to be on shelves and available on September 10th with a MSRP of $649USD