AMD’s R9 Nano crams a full Fury X into a tiny 6-inch form factor

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ars.AD.queue.push(["xrailTop", {sz:"300x251", kws:["bottom"], collapse: true}]);Earlier this year, AMD unveiled three new graphics cards: the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, and R9 Nano. While the top-of-the-line water-cooled R9 Fury X and air-cooled R9 Fury have both since been released to positive reviews, the mini-ITX sized R9 Nano has remained something of a mystery. Fortunately, the Nano appears to have been worth the wait. While the Nano costs the same as a Fury X—$649, or about £530 (UK pricing is unconfirmed)—the diminutive card also sports same full-fat Fiji chip, which is crammed into its teeny 6-inch form factor.

With the R9 Nano you get a full 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of 4096-bit memory high-bandwidth memory operating at 1000MHz. AMD claims performance is around 8.2 TFLOPS, which is only five percent below that of the Fury X. Even better, the Nano needs just a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, with a typical power consumption of 175W, which is miles below the 275W of the Fury X.

Of course, such dramatic power savings have to come from somewhere, and for the Nano that means a reduction in clock speed. The Nano's GPU is rated for "up to 1000MHz," with AMD saying that under typical usage in most games it runs between 850MHz and 900MHz. That's around a 14 percent decrease over the 1050MHz of the Fury X, but it's still impressive given the Nano's size. AMD puts performance somewhere between the Fury and Fury X, with the full shader count helping to mitigate the drop in clock speed versus the Fury.