AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano is going to hit the market this week on 10th September 2015. We know that the Nano is powered by AMD’s flagship Fiji graphics core but what is more interesting is that AMD will be allowing Cross Fire compatibility of the Radeon R9 Nano with their Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card that has been available in the market since June 2015.
AMD Radeon R9 Nano, Radeon R9 Fury X and Radeon R9 Fury Can Operate In CrossFireX Mode
The report comes straight from TweakTown who are one of the lucky tech sites to get hands on a review unit of the Radeon R9 Nano graphics card from AMD. Several major sites such as TechReport, HardOCP and TPU have revealed that they won’t be receiving a Radeon R9 Nano graphics card for review. AMD has not explained why they are not sending graphics cards to these sites but it could be due to limited samples which would indicate that there’s a shockingly low supply of Nano cards and it would get hard to find one in the market place. So far there’s no official word from AMD on the supply of Radeon R9 Nano graphics cards.
Back to the main story, TweakTown found out during their testing that the Radeon R9 Nano can operate in CrossFireX mode with the Radeon R9 Fury and Radeon R9 Fury X graphics cards. This is good news as it can provide an easy upgrade path to existing users of the Radeon R9 Fury and Fury X owners. The R9 Nano uses AMD’s full Fiji GPU core that is the same configuration found on the Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card. From previous information, we know that the AMD Radeon R9 Nano is based on the full fat Fiji GPU core. The design is by no means cut down and its amazing how the Fiji GPU runs so well on a design this compact. Based on the 28nm HPX process, the Radeon R9 Nano features 64 compute units which have 64 stream processors per CU, these round up to a total of 4096 stream processors which is the same core count featured on the flagship R9 Fury X graphics card. The card comes with 256 texture mapping units and 64 raster operation units. While the Radeon R9 Fury X has a compute performance of 8.6 TFlops with its 1050 MHz engine clock, the Radeon R9 Nano comes with a total compute performance of 8.19 TFlops with its 1000 MHz engine clock and 516 GFlops of FP64 compute due to Fiji not having required double precision hardware on board.
For memory, the card will feature the 4 GB HBM architecture that is found on all Fiji based cards. The 4 GB HBM will be working at 500 MHz (1.00 GHz effective) clock rate that will be featured across a 4096-bit wide memory interface that pushes out 512 GB/s bandwidth. The HBM can be seen as one of the major reasons for the R9 Nano being so compact in design and having better performance per watt as HBM saves a good room of power requirements and space compared to traditional GDDR5 memory based cards. As was the case with Fury X and Fury, the HBM will not support modifications or overclocking support, officially. The card will be fully compatible with AMD technologies that include Freesync, VSR, Frame Target Control and fully support the DirectX 12 API which is a really good reason for everyone to be upgrading to newer cards with DX12 support underneath the hood.
Retailing at a price of $649 US, the pricing is quite steep but AMD has again and again mentioned that the performance of this super small form factor card falls in the same league as their Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji Pro) graphics card. This is around 10% slower than the Radeon R9 Fury X but still quite a lot of performance for Mini-ITX based solutions. Users owning the Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji Pro) can add a Radeon R9 Nano to their rigs saving both room and adding incredible performance while Fury X owners may want a really good reason to CrossFire a Radeon R9 Nano graphics card. Since the performance level is around 10% short of the Fury X and retailing at the same price of $649 US, the R9 Fury X is the better choice over Nano to CrossFire with unless you have a really small PC with no room to add an additional 120mm radiator which the reference Fury X comes with. Only then, you might want to add a R9 Nano to the rig and that’s the whole point of the Nano. It’s built for small form factor PCs as Fury X already exists as a better option for users with massive full-size and mid-tower rigs. Now there’s a lot of you who have been waiting so long to see the performance numbers of the Radeon R9 Nano card but you will have to wait just three more days to feast you eyes upon the reviews from various tech sites.
