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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Jm09 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Yes I'm aware, but the nano is binned for the highest quality chips. I wish they would of released two models where one was clocked lower and didn't have binned chips. That alone increased the price of this chipMaddyScientist - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
It would be nice to use the latest version of LuxMark 3.1, as this has optimizations for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, that makes it run faster on more recent GPUs. This would would give a better picture of the compute benefits of these new GPUS.at80eighty - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Ryan, i realise it's a test bench, but that cable management is making me twitchy :)Ryan Smith - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Noted and agreed. It wasn't really built for public display, it was thrown together for video recording. Small computers are nice, but they're hard to quickly route cables in, especially with my giant hands.awstar - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Review > Compute > Vegas: The Vegas benchmark has peaked. The reviewers should post stats on timeline playback performance, or upgrade the test file to 4K XAVC 32-bit float project levels. This would show a much greater difference between the modern GPUs.Haravikk - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
It's great to see a card like this; finally a proper high end for half-length cards. While there are some good Mini-ITX cases that can take full-length cases, they end up so long that it kind of defeats the point of building small, but half-length cards are usually more in the budget to mid-range bracket, or a generation behind, either way it means a big sacrifice in going small.Hopefully we'll see more competition in this case, as I'm one of those who, in going small, is fine with paying a premium to still remain fairly competitive while doing so.
Regarding the idle noise level though; I still find it weird that there isn't better support out there for switching from integrated to discrete GPUs. Since most people still favour Intel processors this would make a lot of sense given that they have integrated graphics, plus in the Mini-ITX size on the AMD side it can be more cost effective to get an APU anyway. If the integrated GPU could take over for desktop stuff, browsing etc. like we see on laptops, then it would leave the Nano to just function as a set of video interfaces, which would be much better.
Alternatively, I wonder if they could even just add an APU type GPU as a low-power alternative onto the card; i.e- with a light load and low VRAM requirements it would take over and just use some low cost RAM (or even system RAM) so that the rest of the card can be shut off entirely.
Peichen - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Modern graphic card only draws single-digit watt power at idle/2D so the whole hybrid GPU idea was dropped. Routing video through integrated GPU also reduce performance by 2-3% and taken into account the complexity involved with driver just to save 8w makes no sense.atomsymbol - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
R9 Nano: 4096 SP, 1 GHz, 512 GB/s => x+5 FPS, price y+$220R9 390X: 2816 SP, 1.05 GHz, 384 GB/s => x FPS, price y
+35% computational power => +5 FPS
Mathos - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
After having read this review. All I can really think of to say about the Nano, is they should of priced it at least the same as the regular R9 Fury. That way you'd easily get GTX 980 performance in a itx form factor, for close to the same price. I must say your review seems a bit more fair than Toms hardware. Somehow they had a regular 980 outperforming the FuryX, so I was like wth Toms.I personally had been waiting for the Nano reviews to come out, before deciding what to get. But going by the price, it looks like I'll be getting an R9 Fury, so I can run most games in VSR 1440p, scaled down to 1080p. Either that or I'll just cap my fps at 65 and save power. Should do well once more DX12 games come out too.
itproflorida - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
you have no idea what your talking about its all speculation. thank you