14 DAY TRIAL // AMD Furies are known for their raw power, their high-tech HBM graphics, and generally for being powerful enough to contend with NVIDIA's top tier graphics cards like the GTX 980Ti.
Having in mind the bigger Furies like the liquid-cooled R9 Fury X and the air-cooled R9 Fury and that both come with 4096 Stream Processors, 256 Texturing Units and 64 Raster Units, you'd think that only seriously big, powerful and hungry cards could hold such raw power.
AMD insists on contradicting users who believe that bigger is better and puts the same raw performance in a small form factor card with almost exactly the same number of stream processors, the same texture units and the same clock as its bigger brothers but being half their size.
The R9 Nano is basically a scaled down R9 Fury with almost identical specs and with the same HBM stacked memory on the GPU die. The card comes with the same Fiji GPU as the Fury X, it sports 4GB HBM1 4096-bit at 500 MHz (1 GHz effective) with a bandwidth of 512 GB/s that results in 8.19 TFLOPS compute performance.
Probably the most compact and powerful mini-ITX graphics card in the world
Design-wise, the card offers almost an industrial layout very similar to that of the R9 Fury X but smaller and with a fan added to it. It has a full metal shroud, with a brushed aluminum finish covering a matte black PCB on which the die, circuitry and HBM memory is placed. It has four video ports consisting in not one or two, but three DisplayPorts and one HDMI port, so no DVI here anymore, it seems old tech must die, in a 6.7"x6.7" mini-ITX PCIe x8 form factor.
The cooling solution is formed by a dedicated heat-pipe voltage regulator cooling and a dual vapor chamber and heat-pipe thermal solution, made to dissipate as much heat from the chip as possible. AMD believes that, through its 175W typical board power, the card will give twice performance per watt and twice performance density than its direct competitor, the GTX 970 mITX, while being 16dBA quieter than the Radeon R9 290X.
AMD believes that while mini-ITX cards from NVIDIA like the GTX 970 Mini and GTX 960 Mini will offer decent performance only in 1080p and 1440p resolutions, the R9 Nano will proudly go into the 4K realm, providing satisfactory results in UHD resolutions, and being the only one in its class to do so.
The Radeon R9 Nano is now available at all retailers with a suggested price of $640.
