AMD Radeon R9 Nano Benchmarks Revealed

AMD’s official marketing material surrounding the upcoming R9 Nano has been released and makes bold claims about being “The fastest Mini-ITX Card”. Recently, we reported on the confirmed technical specifications of the R9 Nano which features 4096 shader cores, 256 TMUs, 64 ROPs and 4GB HBM. This means the R9 Nano utilizes Fiji’s full core but in an incredibly small form factor without the need for water cooling. Interestingly, AMD appears to be targeting ITX versions of the GTX 970 and their leaked press release suggests the R9 Nano is 30% faster.

However, the benchmarks were recorded at 4K resolutions and it’s important to remember that the GTX 970 isn’t really geared towards this resolution. Furthermore, the furore surrounding NVIDIA’s 4GB VRAM implementation can cause issues at huge resolutions. On another note, there’s no specific information regarding what settings were used which can easily skew the final results. As always, it’s wise to take any marketing benchmarks with a pinch of salt.

Aesthetically, the GPU is gorgeous and adopts a more premium design compared to ITX varients of the GTX 970. There’s no denying how appealing the R9 Nano is to system builders looking for an attractive and portable LAN rig.

The press documentation provides information about the Dual Vapor Chamber and overall cooling solution. By default, the card is clocked at 1000MHz, and I’m interested to see the operating temperatures under full load. Does the Fiji chip require a liquid-based GPU cooler to reach its full potential? Another factor to take into account is price, as the GTX 970 retails between £230-330 depending on the aftermarket model and offers an incredible price to performance ratio. HBM is expensive, and in low yields, so can AMD realistically get close to this price?

Do you think the R9 Nano is powerful enough or have too many concessions been made?

Thank you VideoCardz for providing us with this information.