AMD’s R9 Nano crams a full Fury X into a tiny 6-inch form factor

Earlier this year, AMD unveiled three new graphics cards: the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, and R9 Nano. While the top-of-the-line water-cooled R9 Fury X and air-cooled R9 Fury have both since been released to positive reviews, the mini-ITX sized R9 Nano has remained something of a mystery. Fortunately, the Nano appears to have been worth the wait. While the Nano costs the same as a Fury X—$649, or about £530 (UK pricing is unconfirmed)—the diminutive card also sports the same full-fat Fiji chip, which is crammed into its teeny 6-inch form factor.

With the R9 Nano you get full 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of 4096-bit high-bandwidth memory operating at 1000MHz. AMD claims performance is around 8.2 TFLOPS, which is only five percent below that of the Fury X. Even better, the Nano needs just a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, with a typical power consumption of 175W, which is miles below the 275W of the Fury X.

Of course, such dramatic power savings have to come from somewhere, and for the Nano that means a reduction in clock speed. The Nano's GPU is rated for "up to 1000MHz," with AMD saying that under typical usage in most games it runs between 850MHz and 900MHz. That's around a 14 percent decrease over the 1050MHz of the Fury X, but it's still impressive given the Nano's size. AMD puts performance somewhere between the Fury and Fury X, with the full shader count helping to mitigate the drop in clock speed versus the Fury.

Keeping the Nano cool is a combination vapour chamber and heat-pipe solution with a single fan, which largely vents hot air outside of the case, making it a great fit for smaller mini-ITX systems. AMD claims that because the Nano is targeted at the sweet spot of the Fiji power/performance curve, its target temperature under load (albeit with decent case cooling) is 75 degrees Celsius. Even better, the card won't start throttling until it hits 85 degrees, which is the typical load temperature for most high-end graphics cards.

Specs at a glance	R9 Nano	R9 Fury X	R9 Fury	R9 390X	R9 290X
Stream Processors	4096	4096	3584	2816	2816
Texture Units	256	256	224	176	176
ROPs	64	64	64	64	64
Boost Clock	"Up to" 1000MHz	1050MHz	1000MHz	1050MHz	1000MHz
Memory Bus Width	4096-bit	4096-bit	4096-bit	512-bit	512-bit
Memory Clock	1GHz	1GHz	1GHz	6GHz	5GHz
Memory Bandwidth	512GB/s	512GB/s	512GB/s	384GB/s	320GB/s
Memory Size	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	8GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5
Typical Board Power	175W	275W	275W	250W	250W

The Nano sports a similar design theme to the Fury X, with a brushed aluminium finish, full metal shroud, and matte black PCB. It'll initially only be available in the reference design, but partner cards with different designs will arrive later in the year. That said, users who are brave enough to install third-party cooling solution, or water-cool the card, will be able to overclock the card to Fury X levels simply by changing the power target in AMD's Catalyst Control Center software. Further overclocking will be possible with third-party tools like MSI's Afterburner software.

The Nano is an extremely interesting product, then, and as AMD points out, there's not really much else like it on the market. Both the R9 380 Compact and GTX 970 Mini have similar form factors, but both are in a completely different performance bracket to the Nano. For those building a mini-ITX gaming PC that can't take a full-length graphics card, or even those wanting to build a low-power CrossFire system (there's support for up to four-way CrossFire), the Nano is potentially going to be the best option.

At $649/£530, you will have to pay for the privilege when the Nano is released on September 10. But on paper at least, performance should be outstanding compared to the competition. AMD is also at pains to point out that the Nano and Fury X are a "dual flagship stack," with one "all about performance," and the other "about form factor." Whether users will see it that way remains to be seen, but consider our interest piqued.

If the Nano does indeed perform as well as, if not better than, the Fury thanks to its full shader count, then it'll be an outstanding card for smaller system builds. That's not to mention the potential for overclocking, which could push performance even further. Hopefully we'll get to put the card through its paces; we'd love to see how the R9 Nano does under DirectX 12.