Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by NCI XCOM great technology selection and service AMD's r9 nano officially launched on august 27th where we saw the initial slide deck with aspects the card design an hour at the time speculation of how the Nana will perform against competing cards and all of that can be found in our r9 nano explained video linked in the description or in the eye here I'm a tree tree with hard rock nuts and the r9 nano officially launched today for retail we have all the gaming performance or the acoustics power consumption frequencies and everything will be ready for you in this video make sure to stick around this can't be a good one now to quickly recap what the Nano is trying to achieve is become the ultimate 4k compact ITX GPU for the living room simply because it's so tiny at six inches or 15 centimeters with a great cooling solution yet feature a fully enabled Fiji XT core the same that is found on the fury ax with 4 gigabytes of HP M but with a 100 watt TDP reduction than the flagship and this is done through picking only the most efficient course and thus introduced a challenge in its own for availability and overclocking that we'll talk a bit later priced at $649 the r9 nano is a niche card for several reasons first you can look at what competing cards you can get for the same amount of money like the really appealing fury X or the 980ti second if you're really after the ITX form factor most newly-released small form-factor enclosures support 10 half-inch GPUs that could void the compact appeal of the nano take the SG 13 from Silverstone for example this is a perfect I TX chassis for the Nano that leaves plenty of space inside for a front mounted radiator as the car does not even extend past the motherboard itself and you could say that this case is actually too big for the Nano on the flip side of that coin the SD 13 has no issues accommodating for 980 or a 980 TI first I suspect that most potential owners of the Nano will take a really narrow case on purpose to accommodate for that short form factor as put the nano inside the full tower and an ATX motherboard and to me this looks completely out of place and while looks aren't really everything the r9 nano is an ITX card designed for ITX habitat only in my opinion but be aware of the fact that aside from triple DisplayPort 1.2 the HDMI port is only one point four which makes 4k gaming in the living room not as appealing at 30 Hertz as most UHD TVs still are not equipped with DisplayPort now for the price I was expecting AMD to focus a bit more on the shroud design especially considering how much thought and emphasis went into the cooller designed for the fury acts so the Radeon text on both sides is not illuminated it's just vibrant red and gets kind of lost in the dark plus we have no backplate leaving the dart PCB exposed which i think is on purpose as most ITX cases will have the GPU standing like so and the backplate you could say is not really necessary it is impressive tall at what AMD can achieve with such a tiny yet effective cooler and a single 90mm fan keeping the car during load at 74 degrees Celsius which is a fantastic temperature for tight enclosures although the VRMs check out these thermal shots here gets super hot and we advise to set up the best possible air flow to get rid of all that heat away from the PCB now there's a constant balancing act with monitoring core frequencies to hit the power and temperature targets with a nano hovering around 900 megahertz which was our exact expectation having said that our sample experienced some terrible coil whine bumping the nano into being one of the loudest cards in our stack this is not the fans fault per se as it is library quiet as Amy calls it but the coil whine is definitely part of the equation take a listen to power the nano you'd need a single a pin that plugs into the bag and thus extends the length of the GPU by at least an inch keep that in mind however check out that power consumption the r9 nano turns out to be an incredibly efficient GPU when compared against the fury ax we are happy to see this and the bidding process seems to have made a significant impact on separating the Nano against all other GPUs and with that out of the way let's check out the benchmarks now obviously from a fewer raw performance perspective the r9 nano isn't at the top of the charts but given its place in a completely different category for ITX the Nano is a powerhouse of its own beating the 1980 and 390x easy as for overclocking Headroom we were not expecting much from the Nano and were pleasantly surprised when the core pushed all the way to 1070 megahertz stable bring the performance right below the fury X so where does this leave us with the Nano it's obviously not a perfect GPU with two major downsides being acoustics and the lack of hdmi 2.0 whereas power efficiency stable core frequencies and form factor are all major selling points and for prospective buyers it really becomes a balancing act whether or not you value the ITX length of the card over loud operation and whether or not your priorities lie with the size and not within choosing to go similarly priced but outperforming solution but having said that this is an absolute step in the right direction and we're giving it the harbor Canucks damn innovative award and so now that you've seen all the numbers would you recommend the r9 nano to a friend who is potentially building an ITX system for the living room and if not how would you set up the perfect ITX gaming machine leave your thoughts in the comments below thanks so much for watching make sure to subscribe for more similar content and we'll see you in the next one