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At E3 this past summer, AMD appear four new GPUs that would make up its side by side-generation product family: The Radeon Fury Ten, the Fury, the Fury Nano, and the as-nevertheless-unreleased dual-GPU Fury. Nosotros've covered each launch in plough, but the R9 Nano (AMD opted to shorten the proper noun) is arguably the pinnacle of the unabridged Fury family. While it'southward non expected to lucifer the Radeon Fury X's performance, it's fifty-fifty shorter than the Fury 10's 7.5 inches. At just six inches, the Nano is exactly the aforementioned size as a PCIe x16 slot. Any shorter, and AMD would've had to compromise on autobus bandwidth.

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The Radeon Nano

In person, the card is as as impressive equally information technology looks in pictures. At six inches long, it's actually shorter than the first 3D accelerator I e'er bought, the Diamond Monster Ii. GPUs accept gotten larger and smaller over the years, but I don't e'er think AMD or Nvidia fielding a GPU this pocket-size at the high end of the product stack. This opens upwardly all style of interesting system possibilities for mini-ITX or small form gene enthusiasts, and that's the audition that AMD wants to target with this card.

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The Radeon Nano in a mini-ITX system.

One note: We don't currently accept data to share on how the Nano performs specifically in a mini-ITX configuration. The chassis that we ordered for the review shipped late and missed its airplane. Equally a outcome, our Coolermaster Aristocracy 110 is currently sitting in Newark, NJ. For at present, nosotros've decided to review the bill of fare against both the GTX 970 Mini and its full-size cousins and competitors from AMD and Nvidia in a full-size ATX chassis. AMD may have a different market place in mind for this GPU, but there'south no reason it can't exist used in a full-size chassis — and users interested in purchasing one may want to know its performance characteristics in dissimilar thermal environments.

A tiny GPU with a steep colina to climb

The Nano is the smallest high-end GPU we've ever tested and the card's cooler and heatsink are clearly high-course, but the price gap betwixt the R9 Nano and its closest competitor is aught to sneeze at. The GTX 970 Mini is a $355 GPU, going up against a $649 Nano. That'southward a high bar to clear, and if y'all're looking to the Nano to justify it strictly on performance grounds, you lot're going to exist disappointed. The Nano is more than complicated than that, for reasons we're going to be discussing.

GTX 970 MiniLike the R9 Nano, the Asus GTX 970 Mini is a small GPU at 6.7-inches long with a double-wide PCIe slot, ii DVI ports, HDMI, and a DisplayPort. Asus clocks the card at 1088MHz base and 1228MHz boost — a hair above Nvidia's stock 1050MHz / 1178MHz configuration.

Examination and Nano configuration

Nosotros tested the Nano in our Cadre i7-5960X testbed (Haswell-E) with 16GB of DDR4-2667 and Windows 8.1 with all patches and updates installed. While nosotros intend to update to Windows 10 in the most time to come, our previous testing was all done with Windows 8.1, and nosotros chose to maintain that continuity rather than upgrading mid-wheel.

We've made one modify to our test suite and replaced the older Metro Last Low-cal, which debuted in 2022, with the upgraded Metro Last Light Redux, which shipped a year later. All of our AMD and Nvidia cards have been retested in the new championship, and our power consumption figures were recalculated using the newer version of the game as well.

When we decided to test the R9 Nano in both a mini-ITX box and standard chassis, nosotros decided to brand ane boosted modification to the GPU'south default configuration. Instead of leaving the GPU at its default power settings, nosotros used Catalyst Command Center to tell the GPU to employ upwards to l% more power than normal. This was done in lodge to measure out the performance delta betwixt Nano and the Fury X in a more conventional belfry as opposed to a thermally constrained mini-ITX organization.

In order to present at least some additional data on how Nano performs in a standard configuration, we backtracked and tested the R9 Nano at its default power level in Metro Concluding Light Redux. While this is simply one information signal at nowadays, using that game let u.s. make an apples-to-apples comparison with all the other GPUs we evaluated.

We attempted to employ third-party drivers to modify the GTX 970's maximum power consumption, but the Asus GTX 970 Mini doesn't appear to support this feature in Asus' own GPU Tweak or MSI Afterburning. Nvidia Inspector reported that it could change the GPU to 110% of standard, but that utility hasn't been updated in more than a year and we saw no performance differences between 100% and 110%. Either the utility no longer functions or the GTX 970 Mini doesn't need it.

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