Club3D R9 Nano 4GB HBMv1 Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

Price

The Club3D R9 Nano is extremely scarce to find for sale, but the R9 Nano, in general, can be purchased for £499.99 in the UK and $649.99 in the US.

Overview

There we have it, the final piece in the AMD Fiji puzzle. It ticks all of the boxes that AMD set out to achieve. This is an extremely niche product, the R9 Fury is cheaper and proves to be more powerful through our testing today, but some of the options can be quite large, such as our Sapphire Tri-x R9 Fury test card.

AMD has definitely gone for function over form with this card, using lighter materials for the overall shroud and a large fan. The new Radeon logo is present along the side with cutouts to draw in more air and to break up the side of black with splashes of silver. By far not the most interesting to look at, but it’s not every day you can say you’ve almost got R9 Fury X performance in a much smaller package

AMD have been losing out of the mITX market segment to NVIDIA thanks to the highly popular GTX 970ITX and even the GTX 960ITX, but with mITX motherboards becoming more feature filled and supporting more powerful CPU’s, such as those from the X99 series. This more powerful combination demands a more powerful graphics card, which NVIDIA hasn’t produced.

The overall performance of this card sits perfectly between the R9 Fury and GTX 980. Ignoring the price, it is a great performer and even more so when you consider how little power it requires and the compact size. I was pleasantly surprised how well it handled 1440p gameplay and even how close it was to 60FPS in some 4K benchmarks.

Pros

• Compact size
• Great power to watt ratio
• DX12 compliant
• Excellent cooling considering single fan

Cons

• Poor overclocking headroom
• No sub-vendor cooling options available from factory
• Poor worldwide availability of the Fiji chip

Neutral

• Power consumption is high compared to the GTX 980Ti, but going in the right direction
• Niche market, so prices may not fall as fast as mainstream cards

“This niche product might not appeal to everyone, but the mITX market is expanding rapidly. If you’re wanting a mighty gaming system but are keen to stick to a tiny form factor,  the Nano is one of the best cards for the job that we’ve ever seen.”

Thank you to Club3D for providing this review sample.