Conclusion; A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
Conclusion; A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
I initially had my doubts about the R9 Nano. After AMD’s preview the consensus on our forums and throughout the tech community was that it was far too expensive, didn’t offer enough performance (based on initially vague estimates) and targeted a niche that had already moved beyond limited GPU support. Not much has changed from any of those standpoints but my overall outlook towards its positioning and future outlook has been thoroughly rearranged. I’m still not entirely sold on the Nano’s appeal outside a very narrow subset of the ITX market but it is enlightening to see what happens when a company like AMD takes a chance and thinks outside the box.
The R9 Nano certainly isn’t meant to be a volume leader and it likely won’t help prop up their flagging balance sheet but AMD is evidently on the right track here. They needed something which highlights the benefits of HBM’s unified core approach while also justifying the move to a new memory standard that has evidently hurt availability of key top-tier SKUs. Mission accomplished on those points.
More importantly, the Nano is a unique product in a market known for its sameness and proves that sometimes the best ideas come when your back is up against a wall. AMD faces falling a market share and to combat that, halo products like this one help prop up a brand’s image and get folks excited again. And there’s a lot here to be excited about since NVIDIA has absolutely nothing that can remotely compete against it in certain categories. This is truly a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a surprising one at that.
AMD needed to finely balance power consumption and heat output of their volcano-like Fiji core if they had any hope of achieving a modicum of performance in such a small form factor card. To accomplish that tightrope-like balancing act, a stringent binning process was put in place which selects only the most efficient cores for use within the R9 Nano. Even then, hard limits were put on clock speeds and core voltage in an effort to reign in TDP.
Instituting those caps pushed performance downwards but, surprisingly, not by all that much. In both a well-ventilated ITX enclosure and an open test bench the R9 Nano’s core frequency still hovered around the 890MHz mark. It did so with very minimal deltas between maximum and minimum clocks, pointing towards a strictly controlled yet perfectly predictable performance curve. AMD also boosted efficiency to stratospheric levels and somehow managed to still keep temperatures well under control.
The end result of AMD’s engineering wizardry is nothing short of eye-opening for anyone who thought this thing would fall on its face when temperatures started to rise. At 1440P, the R9 Nano was able easily overcome the GTX 980 and R9 390X while blowing AMD’s own previous generation flagship (the R9 290X in Uber mode) out of the water. It even came daringly close to the R9 Fury and only lost to the Fury X by 12%.
At 4K the Nano pulls even further ahead of the competition which is par for the course with AMD’s new architecture. However, in UHD scenarios the Fury X does slightly improve its lead but not by all that much.
Pricing and availability will likely be the Nano’s largest hurdles to overcome. Sometimes receiving a free product causes us reviewers to turn a blind eye towards its true cost to end users but that $649 price point is impossible to ignore. If you are looking to maximize your performance per dollar ratio, this card is a leper. The extreme binning may cause some severe shortages as well.
With that being said, the true value of any product rests in the eyes of the beholder. Much like a sports car will look overpriced for anyone who is looking for a family hauler, the R9 Nano is targeted towards a very specific niche market and won’t have broad appeal. However, in the ultra small form factor segment it offers boundless potential.
The Nano is certainly a promising card, one which points towards a bright future for compact form factors but it does tend to suffer from an identity crisis in certain scenarios. Many will simply struggle to understand where this card fits into their buying plans. There’s still a not-so-insignificant performance gap between it and AMD’s already-compact, identically priced R9 Fury X. The Nano is a prime candidate for the ITX market and yet most compact cases worth their salt have been successfully able to integrate 10” or even 12” long graphics cards into the svelte frames. According to the press materials it should be a perfect solution for an SFF living room PC feeding into a 4K TV. However, AMD didn’t equip their little monster with an HDMI 2.0 output or HDCP 2.2 support and most new UHD TV’s don’t feature a DisplayPort input…so forget about getting access to that key 4K60 format.
Now before I wrap this up there is a small caveat to this whole conclusion which I didn’t want to bring up until now since it will affect each buyer differently. The R9 Nano isn’t a quiet card at all. The fan itself isn’t the culprit since it remains blissfully quiet while gaming. Rather, this thing’s inductors squeals like a scorched pig in higher framerate scenarios and emits chugging noises when rendering less than 40FPS. Some may be willing to overlook this or jam the Nano into an acoustically dampened case but that’s still not an excuse for once again failing to address a major limitation on a halo product. After the R9 290X’s overly loud fan and the Fury X’s well publicized pump issues this is the last thing AMD needed, especially for a card that is meant for confined environments. Luckily, once it is tucked away inside a case, the drone of the inductors is drastically reduced.
For many this card will feel like a tech demo, a product that acts as a proof of concept for future generations of AMD graphics cards. However, for buyers living in the present rather than the future, there are infinitely more capable and less expensive GPUs that can still fit into the lion’s share of ITX cases. Does make the Nano a failure? Absolutely not since for its intended purposes, it is a resounding success if you're willing to ignore its coil whine and possibly wait for stock to become available.
The R9 Nano may be a perfect example of conflicting realities but regardless of its high price and inherent limitations; this is a technical tour-de-force. There may more appealing options that will fit into today’s crop of small form factor cases but it represents a tantalizing glimpse at what the future could, and likely will, hold.
