AMD Officially Announces the Radeon R9 Nano Graphics Card

We have been talking about it all week and now it is finally here! AMD has officially announced the Radeon R9 Nano Graphics Card! So let’s just get right to it with the specifications of the card. The Radeon R9 Nano comes with a fully-configured Fiji GPU with 4096 stream processors, 64 ROPs, 256 TMUs, and 64 compute units. The card comes with 4GB of HBM memory directly on the GPU itself. The GPU clock can boost up to 1000 MHz and the memory is locked at 500 MHz / 1.0 Gbps for up to 512GB/s bandwidth.

AND Radeon R9 Nano

Not only is the card small and compact at only 6-inches in length, but it is also extremely power efficient. The card only needs a single 8-pin PCI-Express power connector and has a TDP of only 175W. A Mini-ITX motherboard is only 6.7-inches x 6.7-inches so this makes the R9 Nano the perfect card for such a set up. A lot of the power efficiency has to do with the HBM memory. GDDR5 memory on this setup would typically have a power draw of 50W, where the HBM on the Nano only requires 8W.

AND Radeon R9 Nano

As I said the GOU clock can go up to 1000 MHz, but in most situations you will likely get between 850-900 MHz. This is to achieve the best performance-per-watt. AMD has also stated that the card is the fastest Mini-ITX card on the planet, comparing it to the GeForce GTX 970 Mini-ITX card. With that said you should see a 30% performance increase over the GTX 970, I would wait for reviews to see how it does against the GTX 980 and 980 Ti.

AND Radeon R9 Nano

Being such a small powerful card many users might be worried about temperatures and of course noise. We all know the AMD’s R9 290X was extremely loud and got quite hot. AMD is using a dedicated heatpipe and heatsink for the VRM. This goes quite a long way and we haven’t seen something like this from AMD before.

AND Radeon R9 Nano

Next you have a dual vapor chamber and heatpipe thermal solution. This combination will actually allow the fan to spin at a lower speed and require less power. This makes the card much more quiet compared to the R9 290X, AMD says the R9 Nano is 16 dBA quieter with a noise level of 42 dBA.

AND Radeon R9 Nano

So at the end of the day the R9 Nano has the same setup as the Fury X, but designed to be more power efficient and compact. I think this card will be the card to get for small form factor builds! How much is it? AMD has set the MSRP at $649. So will you be getting a R9 Nano?

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