The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTThe Competition
One of the issues in testing an unusual card like the R9 Nano is figuring out what to test it against. By and large most of the video cards we receive are, well, large, which is suitable for evaluating high performance cards, but presents a bit more of a problem when looking for something to compare the R9 Nano to.
Anticipating this problem, AMD offered to send us a competitive NVIDIA card as well, ASUS’s GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini. As a matter of policy we typically don’t accept rival cards from a vendor in this fashion in order to avoid testing pre-arranged (and contrived) scenarios. However in this case we had already been looking into NVIDIA Mini-ITX cards for this review and had previously settled on trying to get one of the GTX 970 minis, so we opted to break from standard policy and accept the card. As a result we want to be transparent about accepting an NVIDIA card from AMD.
Left: AMD Radeon R9 Nano. Right: ASUS GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini
The Test
Meanwhile after some early experimentation on how to best evaluate the R9 Nano, we have opted to break from tradition a little bit here as well and test the card in two rigs. For our published numbers and for the purposes of apples-to-apples comparisons we are using our standard AnandTech GPU Testbed, a full-tower ATX system.
However in order to also test the R9 Nano in cozier conditions more fitting of its small size, we have also run a limited selection of cards within a second testbed as a control. Unfortunately we don’t have any true Mini-ITX systems around that are suitable for testing the R9 Nano, but for the next best thing we have turned to our frame capture workstation. Based on a Silverstone Sugo SG09 microATX case, this rig is built around a Core i7-3770 and typically houses our frame capture hardware for frame time analysis. For our testing we have pulled this out and set it up with some of our video cards in order to ensure that these cards operate similarly in cramped conditions.
The AnandTech microATX Video Capture Workstation w/R9 Nano
By and large the microATX case simply confirmed our results on our regular testbed after accounting for CPU differences, satisfying that testing in our larger regular testbed wasn’t unfairly impacting any of our major cards. However we’ll revisit the microATX case for our look at power, temperature, and noise.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 Fury X ASUS STRIX R9 Fury AMD Radeon R9 Nano Club3D R9 390X 8GB royalQueen OC (Underclocked to 1050MHz) AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 285 AMD Radeon HD 7970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 ASUS GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 355.82 AMD Catalyst Cat 15.201.1102 |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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Gigaplex - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Not quite. They didn't actually lower voltages.Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
OC load power consumption under Crysis 3 is the same as stock load power consumption. What went wrong there? Is the card really not overclocking or do you have the wrong data?Communism - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Powertune is the limiter, which sets a soft long wattage limit.In other words, you can overclock the card to 9000 mhz and it would still use the same long term max power.
What's happening is that the card is simply throttling even more heavily compared to stock clocks.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Power consumption went up by 59W: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph9621/77410...Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
GTX980 crushes this thing. You can easily fit a GTX 980 into a Corsair Air 240. There really isnt much to be gained by going smaller than a Corsair Air 240. If AMD really wants to go after mini pc market, then they need to strip out 10% of those compute cores, replace them with carrizo modules, quadruple the amount of HBM, and replace one of the HBM chips with a flash chip. They could create an entire motherboard that would be roughly the size of that Nano pcb. Slap it into a tiny case and boom you have a product no one can match.jardows2 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Like I mentioned earlier. This card is for a niche boutique build. I wouldn't buy one for myself, as I don't need the power in such a small product. But general mass consumers are well known for buying something for looks rather than practicality. A tiny computer that is only big enough to fit the Nano? There are people who would spend the money to buy it!medi03 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
"R9 Nano demonstrates slightly better performance than GTX 980 –around 5% at 2560x1440"Crushes, eh?
Peichen - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
What a fail. More than twice as expensive as GTX970 mini but only 20% faster and runs hotter, louder and hungrier as well. The FURY chips are very inefficient compares with Nvidia's offerings and I am not sure how many people would pay $370 more just for 20% in an ITX setup. Most ITX case can take 10" card as well.palindrome - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
You answered your own question. The card is 20+% faster than the closest competitor in this space.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
so who would pay twice as much for 20% more performance? not many, seeing as the 970 is good enough for 1080p and is still surprisingly good at 1440p.