The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Of all of the Fiji-based cards we’ve looked at so far, I feel like the Radeon R9 Nano is the most interesting of them. It’s not the fastest card or the cheapest card, but I like that AMD is trying unconventional things. A product like the R9 Nano will never be a high volume product, but it’s the kind of outside the box thinking AMD needs to do in order to better differentiate themselves from NVIDIA and to escape their increasingly damaging reputation as the value alternative underdog.
To that end there’s a lot to like about the R9 Nano, though it admittedly defies standard categorization at times. By all practical metrics this is a luxury card in the same vein as NVIDIA’s GTX Titan series, but at the same time it’s not a card built for chart-topping performance. Rather it’s a card built to push the envelope on power and space efficiency. This makes AMD’s job to sell the card to the public both harder and easier, though not always for obvious reasons.
Starting with the highlights then, let’s talk about the size. As far as Mini-ITX cards go the R9 Nano is a card without an equal. It is the fastest Mini-ITX card on the market and comfortably so, thanks to the fact that all other cards in this space are based on lower performing parts such as the GeForce GTX 970 and Radeon R9 380. Producing a small card is a solid, practical application of the Fiji package and the space savings of HBM, allowing AMD to produce a card just 6 inches (152mm) long. If you need the fastest thing that fits into 170mm or less – and you don’t mind paying top dollar for it – then the R9 Nano has earned its place right there.
Meanwhile when it comes to energy efficiency, the R9 Nano also marks a new high point for AMD. To cut right to the chase, AMD has struggled on the subject of energy efficiency for some time now, particularly since NVIDIA launched their Maxwell 1 and Maxwell 2 architectures last year. The release of the R9 Nano represents a significant improvement for AMD, showing us what an energy efficient implementation of Fiji is capable of.
Relative to the other Fiji cards – the Radeon R9 Fury series – AMD has been able to significantly cut their power consumption in exchange for a limited performance regression. At 2560x1440 – what I expect will be the gaming sweet spot for the R9 Nano – the card delivers 90% of the R9 Fury X’s performance and 96% of the R9 Fury’s performance. Though a tangible decrease in performance, it comes with 35% and 20% decrease in power consumption respectively, allowing AMD to offer better performance-per-watt than any other Radeon product to date.
Now there is a catch here, and that these efficiency improvements come from chip binning and a careful crafting of the product specifications, and not from an architectural improvement. On the whole Fiji still needs to draw quite a bit of power to achieve its peak performance and R9 Nano doesn’t change this. Instead with R9 Nano AMD makes a deliberate and smart trade-off to back off on GPU clockspeeds to save significant amounts of power. The last 100MHz of any chip is going to be the most expensive from a power standpoint, and as we’ve seen this is clearly the case for Fiji as well.
Otherwise on a broader competitive basis, while AMD is enjoying an improvement in energy efficiency they still must contend with NVIDIA, and here is where things get murky. Relative to the rest of their lineup the R9 Nano’s energy efficiency is fantastic. However relative to the energy efficiency of NVIDIA’s lineup, AMD’s gains mostly serve to close the gap that already existed. While admittedly only painting the broadest of strokes here, R9 Nano demonstrates slightly better performance than GTX 980 –around 5% at 2560x1440 – for a similar increase in power consumption. Which is to say that AMD has closed the gap, but they don’t have any real lead.
As a result the answer to the question “is there a market for energy efficient cards within the desktop space?” is going to hinge on price, and that puts AMD in a rough spot given the R9 Nano’s status as a luxury card. Clearly there’s a market for such cards – NVIDIA has spent the last year doing just that – but price is clearly a factor as well. Luxury products typically offer something that no other product offers, and while AMD’s energy efficiency has improved here, they aren’t offering a level of efficiency NVIDIA wasn’t already offering. And that as a result makes AMD’s task all the harder; they can’t pitch energy efficiency as a luxury element if NVIDIA already offers it.
In the end then the R9 Nano is a mixed bag for potential buyers. Its $650 price tag is without a doubt steep compared to the R9 Fury X and GTX 980 Ti, but in its niche of Mini-ITX cards it’s the card to beat, and that will give AMD the room they need to charge that price. On the other hand as great as R9 Nano’s power consumption and energy efficiency are, unless you also need the small size it doesn’t do enough to set itself apart from cheaper products like the GTX 980.
Finally, turning our eyes towards the future, there is one final Fiji product launch on AMD’s 2015 roadmap, and that is the unnamed dual Fiji card. By launching the R9 Nano first, AMD has primed the pump to potentially take their dual-GPU card in one of two different directions. They could essentially combine a pair of R9 Fury Xs and go for a maximum power, maximum performance card similar to the Radeon R9 295X2. On the other hand if they were to combine a pair of R9 Nanos they could produce a slightly slower but much more power efficient card. Both configurations have their virtues and weaknesses – energy efficiency versus absolute performance – so it should be interesting to see which of these two routes AMD takes later this year.
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D. Lister - Sunday, September 13, 2015 - link
The Fermi architecture did indeed have those flaws, not to mention the thermal issues of the 4xx family and the strict power budget of the 5xx series that Nvidia stupidly enforced on its partners. The latter resulting in CTD in the factory overclocked models in some poor PC ports like Crysis 2, where the only solution was to downclock the GPU to its reference state. But despite such rare lapses, Nvidia has evolved steadily, and every generation has rectified the flaws of its predecessor, and improved in terms of features, power usage and temps.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 15, 2015 - link
Don't forget the driver that bricked Fermi cards.D. Lister - Sunday, September 13, 2015 - link
@medi03Sorry, but that nonsense just doesn't cut it anymore. Not after so many years of the same fraudulent babble going on over and over.
If someone "uneducated" was told that product A and product B both performed the same, yet product A could be bought for less money, than most people would go for product A.
If that is not happening than obviously there is more to this than purely performance/dollar(*), and the market is a lot more educated in the year 2015 than your fanboy delusions would've led you to believe.
Honestly, you AMD fanatics are like the Westboro Baptist Church of technology. I wouldn't be surprised if you lot started picketing outside the Intel and Nvidia HQs with "God hates Intel/Nvidia" placards.
*-Sadly, thanks to that HBM gimmick, AMD doesn't even have the performance/dollar feature anymore. The Nano's MSRP equals the 20-30% stronger 980Ti's retail value, and because of its rarity, actually is more expensive than the 980Ti.
medi03 - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
I don't recall talking about "performance dollar", why do you have to lie like that? Is that your imagination?There were CLEAR, HANDS DOWN cases of inferiour products, be it nVidia's Fermi chips, or Intel's Prescott P4 fiasco outselling the competitor. That shows how much clue our "uneducated" public has. End of story.
Now take a deep breath and think if you really have some argument.
D. Lister - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
"I don't recall talking about "performance dollar", why do you have to lie like that? Is that your imagination?"Tsk, tsk, "reading" is obviously not your strong suite.
"There were CLEAR, HANDS DOWN cases of inferiour products, be it nVidia's Fermi chips, or Intel's Prescott P4 fiasco outselling the competitor. That shows how much clue our "uneducated" public has. End of story."
That's your argument? Really? Where can anyone actually even buy Prescotts or Fermis these days? Who is buying them? In those times AMD's market share was significantly higher than it is now and quite rightfully so, rendering your abysmal argument completely moot. And the story didn't end there you silly little man - after Fermi there was Kepler, and then Maxwell. After Prescott there were over a dozen processor families, each and every single one an improvement, not just in raw performance but also in performance/watt and performance/dollar.
Granted that AMD has had improvements as well, but thanks to the terrible decisions of the businessmen at the top (e.g. selling their foundries and getting ATI for a lot more than it was worth, not focusing on their primary markets and losing loyal fans to other companies, etc.), not to mention the terrible software support for often very decent hardware and regularly over-promising and under-delivering, they are where they are now. The facts are ultimately in the ledgers, and mindless corporate drones like yourself can make up absurd stories and conspiracy theories as much as you like - fact is that AMD is dying and as their funds keep shrinking, so does the overall quality of their products, especially compared to the competition.
"Now take a deep breath and think if you really have some argument."
All I can do is shake my head and smile sadly at how completely you miss the irony in your statement. It's okay, once AMD is inevitably ripped apart and its pieces consumed by the corporate sharks and the AMD and Radeon brands are reduced to forgotten footnotes in tech history, cretins like you will find something else to fill the void in your pathetic, pointless existence. Have a nice life, if you can, I'm done with you.
D. Lister - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
Just to make it very clear (again) to any AMD fans that may feel my sentiments to be overtly harsh towards their favored company, I personally believe that whatever has happened to AMD in the last decade or so, is nothing short of a heart-breaking tragedy, where the business fat cats at the top repeatedly made poor short-term decisions and exploited the hard work of brilliant engineers and technicians, giving themselves and their marketing lackeys bigger paychecks while the R&D starved, resulting in AMD as a company never truly reaching its full potential. And we all, as consumers and enthusiasts are worse off for it.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 15, 2015 - link
Too bad for that summary that it ignores the well-made products that AMD's customers have enjoyed and the industry has benefited from.D. Lister - Tuesday, September 15, 2015 - link
@Oxford GuyThat is a given, no? A company that is a complete failure from the start, with everybody under the sun hating their products, can't ever hope to eventually go public, let alone go toe-to-toe, even if for a little while, with an industry giant like Intel.
Unfortunately what AMD did right was rather consistently far outweighed by what they did wrong. For every satisfied customer, they had several that felt screwed over.
AMD is like a race car that has had very good parts, but a lazy pit crew and blind men at the wheel (I resisted the urge of saying "bad drivers", but I'm being too serious here to indulge with lazy puns). So you're reminding me that they pulled a few laps in good time, while I'm lamenting the race that they have nearly lost.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, September 19, 2015 - link
Nice fiction.D. Lister - Sunday, September 20, 2015 - link
lol, thanks. All facts can be reduced to mere fiction when faced with absolute, fanatical denial. But to be fair, yours is hardly the worse, there are still many people who doggedly believe that geocentricism is the truth and all else is lies and fiction.