Amd radeon r9 nano review (analysis in Spanish)

The AMD Radeon R9 Nano has been the last of the 'Fury' family to land on the market and a flagship in all of it as a benchmark in concentrated power, that is, it has had the crown of performance in that sector and that today, until the arrival of the new generations, he continues to hold such a position. It is, probably, the most influential and that it has had the best esteem of its entire generation, since the high prices of the rest of the family (and this one), the scarcity of personalized models, have left many customers cold.

We thank the AMD Spain team for the loan of this graphics card for analysis:

AMD Radeon R9 Nano technical characteristics

Unboxing and design

It is hard to imagine just taking it out of the box, such a small card (and we are talking about no less than 15.5cm long!) And with such a small heatsink, it is capable of holding and containing so much power. It is, without a doubt, the most worked Fury in all its senses, now we will list all the whys.

Starting with its specs, it enjoys fully inheriting the specs of the Fury X and its 'Fiji' core equipped with 4096 GCN Shaders at a frequency of 1000Mhz, 64Rops, 256 texture units (Tmus) and a novel and historic first generation HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), hosting nothing more and nothing less than 4096 Bits, and 4Gb at 500Mhz giving a figure of 512Gb / s of total bandwidth, achieving that in high resolutions, it performs really well, since it is one of the largest needs. In the images below we see the entire Fiji diagram as well as a photograph of the DIE of it, consisting of the GPU and the 4 HBM memory modules.

This innovative memory system not only has the purpose of increasing the effective bandwidth, but also substantially reduces energy consumption (up to 65% less) compared to the well-known GDDR5 and, eliminating all traces of it on the PCB. the card making a graphics card of really reduced dimensions, since they share space with the GPU. We will see the next generation of this memory in the next Pascal and Vega, but we will talk about that at another time.

But not only does it inherit GPU-level features, it also features the same voltage regulators and dual bios. The graph has been as expected, manufactured in TSMC's already veteran 28nm manufacturing process, with the same tremendous figure of 8.9 billion transistors inside. The small Nano only needs a single 8-pin connector for its operation, unlike the two that the Fury X demands, so to move it without risk we need a power supply capable of throwing up to 225W for the card (500W of total power supply).

The connectivity of this card is 3 Displayport 1.2 and an HDMI 1.4a port (with 4K support limited to 30Hz). For 4k @ 60Hz resolutions we will necessarily depend on the DisplayPort ports as well as activate the synchronization technology with the Freesync monitor. It is a card that has been manufactured, apart from its small size, for high resolution performance as mentioned above.

Thanks to its size and characteristics, it has a lower TDP than the Fury X (and 30% less) with a total of 175W and much lower consumption and temperatures. These lower temperatures are the result of the profile that the fan brings by default - and that is not noisy in itself - leaving the card at more than acceptable levels, prevailing the user experience at all times and keeping the card at approximately 75ºC.

This profile has the primary task of prevailing by stressing two things. The first is its temperature and the second is its noise level, but how does it do it? Part of this performance has its origin in the programmed TDP, it will limit the frequencies of the GPU as the demand in games increases and therefore, its temperature, having the final uniform figure of ~ 900Mhz whenever this happens.

AMD opted for a steam chamber heatsink, made of copper all the contact surface and its heatpipe, covering all the vital parts such as its VRM and the entire final size is covered by a huge heatsink with aluminum fins in a horizontal position, making air flow to the outside of the box and part through the front.

The specifications of the card are also made up of AMD's own technologies, we are talking about Freesync, Virtual Super Resolution, Frame Rate Target and specially designed the GCN architecture with asynchronous computing, and the new low-level Apis such as Directx12 and Vulkan.

Test bench and performance tests

TESTING BENCH
Processor:	i7-6700k @ 4200 Mhz..
Base plate:	Asus Maximus VIII Formula.
Memory:	32GB Kingston Fury DDR4 @ 3000 Mhz
Heatsink	Cryorig H7 heatsink
HDD	Samsung 850 EVO SSD.
Graphic card	AMD Radeon R9 Nano.
Power supply	EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G2.

For benchmarks we will use the following titles:

• 3DMark Fire Strike normal.3DMark Fire Strike version 4K.Heaven 4.0.Doom 4.Overwatch.Tomb Raider.Battlefield 4.

All tests have been passed with the filters to the maximum unless we indicate otherwise. To have adequate performance, we have carried out three types of tests: the first is the most common at Full HD 1920 x 1080, the second resolution is making the leap to 2K or 1440 gamers (2560 x 1440) and the most enthusiastic with 4K (3840 x 2160). The operating system we have used has been Windows 10 Pro 64 bit and the latest drivers available from the AMD website.

What are we looking for in the tests?

First, the best possible image quality. The most important value for us is the average FPS (Frames per second), the higher the number of FPS the more fluid the game will go. To differentiate the quality a bit, we leave you a table to assess the quality in FPS, but we will also have the minimum Fps in the tests that were thus possible:

FRAMES BY SECONDS
Frames for Seconds. (FPS)	Gameplay
Less than 30 FPS	Limited
30 - 40 FPS	Playable
40 - 60 FPS	Good
Greater than 60 FPS	Fairly Good or Excellent

Synthetic benchmarks

As we have been doing in our analysis of graphics cards we have reduced to three synthetic tests, since what really matters is the performance in games. The chosen tests are 3DMARK FireStrike Normal (1080p), 3DMARK FireStrike in 4K quality and Heaven 4.0.

As we can see it has a performance similar to the Nvidia GTX 970. But do not be disappointed and wait for the overclock section, since you will get a big surprise;).

Game Testing

We have decided to make the leap to checking various games manually. The reason? Very simple, we want to give a much more realistic vision and cover tests with current games. Since we make an effort, it is consistent with the level of the website and that of our readers.

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Testing in Full HD games

Testing in 2K games

Testing in 4K games

Overclocking

Note: Remember that overclocking or manipulation carries a risk, we and any manufacturer are not responsible for improper use, use the head and always do so at your own risk.

As we said in the description of our card, the card comes by default at a frequency of 1000Mhz as a base but since it is designed to have a temperature and noise level consistent with it, it tends to do something commonly called in this world as' throttling ', and that is why we will see the frequency oscillate around 900Mhz.

With any program, including the official Crinsom software, we can manually alter this behavior with its voltage, frequency and TDP. To improve the already excellent performance of the Fury Nano, we will increase its TDP and create a ventilation profile according to the same, and we will gradually increase the frequency of the GPU until achieving the stability that our unit can provide.

Now we will not only have more frequency but by altering the TDP and improving its temperature with a more 'aggressive' profile (it is the way of saying it, not necessarily 100%) we will avoid any oscillation in the frequencies reaching the performance of the Fury X, translating into really high Fps scaling.

Temperature and consumption

The temperatures of the AMD Radeon R9 Nano are quite good compared to other reference models that AMD launched not long ago. At rest we have obtained 32º C and a maximum of 67º C playing. With overclock temperatures have risen in full performance to 72ºC.

Regarding consumption, we got 71 W at rest and 298 W playing with an Intel i7-6700K processor . When we overclock it goes up to 99 W at rest and 315 W playing at the top.

Final words and conclusion about the AMD Radeon R9 Nano

We arrived quite late for analysis (specifically a year), but it was only a few weeks before we received the sample. The AMD Radeon R9 Nano is one of the best compact graphics cards on the market incorporating more power than an AMD Radeon RX 480 in an ITX format. Can you get more out of it in such a compact size? It is really difficult.

As we have verified in our tests, they defend themselves in all the games in an excellent way in Full HD and 2K, although in 4K it has given quite the stature, but of course… having only 4GB of HBM memory they can be saturated.

Currently it can be found in online stores for about 590 euros approximately. It is a safe bet today, but the same is more profitable to opt for a cheaper card such as the RX 480 or a CrossFireX with its 8GB with a longer support.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ ULTRA COMPACT DESIGN.	- ONLY 4 GB HBM.
+ JUST HAS ELECTRICAL NOISE.	- SOMETHING HIGH PRICE.
+ HBM MEMORIES.
+ PERFECT PERFORMANCE IN FULL HD AND 1440P.
+ VERY COOL TEMPERATURES.

And after carefully evaluating both the evidence and the product, Professional Review awards him the gold medal:

AMD Radeon R9 Nano

COMPONENT QUALITY

DISSIPATION

GAMING EXPERIENCE

SONORITY

PRICE

8.5 / 10

ONE OF THE BEST GPU ITX ON THE MARKET