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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wperry - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Man, going by the comments, there's piss in many a bowls of Cheerios this morning.DanNeely - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
For anyone who doesn't know what's going on, HardOCP put out a good writeup yesterday.http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/09/09/amd_roy_...
TLDR version: A senior AMD manager said some really stupid stuff on twitter.
palindrome - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Shocker, Kyle at HardOCP is butthurt....pt2501 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
After reading the commentary at HardOCP, I generally agree with the senior AMD manager. Nothing he said insinuated that HardOCP was an unfair site, what was said is that HardOCPs focus is for top performance especially overclocking performance. Fury Nano designed to fill a niche for a small but high performance build. We all know the ongoing supply issues exist with Fiji and if you have limited supply you must choose where cards go that produce no income or customer satisfaction or else it will be ANOTHER PAPER launch. The reviewer began his argument by bitching about paper launches on the first page when this limited sample reviews might be designed to mitigate this situation.He complains about AMD only wanting things painted in a favorable light but he illustrates that his is willing to remove content that he finds unfavorable when THE REVIEWER THEN REMOVED A FORUM POST OF A CUSTOM FURY NANO BECAUSE IT WAS NOT IN LINE WITH THE SITE'S FOCUS. Bottom line when this guy even admits he is an asshole. I just cannot accept people taking this reviewer and by extension HardOCPs butthurt attitude about being excluded. The AMD manager didn't even mention HardOCP, his posts where in response to other sites. HardOCP just assumed that this extended to them.
As a reference Anandtech has never been an enthusiastic fan of AMDs' cards since the 9700 pro. Yet AMD and Nvidia have NEVER failed to give them a card to review. Doesn't this seem to speak more about the authenticity and reputation of the review site? While I am wary of venders choosing who gets cards to review, with a product as difficult as the Fiji cards to keep up with demand I more than understand their desire to get cards into people computers. AMD knows these are niche cards but at least they want these cards to get make them money, which AMD needs.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
That site is so amateurish. They didn't even include a single objective noise measurement in power supply reviews.lmcd - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
I didn't realize HardOCP was more than a forum...at80eighty - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
lmfao @ Kyle. his tears are practically soaking my screen.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Thanks for the great review. I think the benchmarks ultimately end up underscoring how much graphics power it currently takes to run games at 4k and certainly argues the case for lower resolutions when it comes to single-GPU situations. Even though the Nano is a much less wattage-absurd GPU, I personally think 175 watts is just too much to be reasonable. I like having warm feet in the winter, but when the CPU is happy with 65 watts, pairing up a graphics card with it that needs almost 3x that much power is frustratingly annoying.Communism - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Take a Fury X, remove some VRMs, remove the closed loop water cooler, set Powertune to -50%, lower voltages a bit.Then sell at the same goddamned price as Fury X with a horrible open air cooler that would be a bad idea in any case that wouldn't be able to fit a Fury X to start with.
Fanboy milking at it's finest.
Asomething - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I partially agree with this, they should have dropped the price, though you are hating on the cooler a bit too much. its keeping in line with the 970 mini's cooler for noise/temps while cooling a hotter card, the cooler exhausts half out the case and half into the the case which is a hell of alot better than the 970 mini which exhausts in all directions (which is about 75% in the case and the rest out the back).