AMD Radeon R9 Nano: 6 Inches Of High-Priced, High-Performance Graphics 26
Vigile writes: Back when AMD announced it would be producing an even smaller graphics card than the Fury X, but based on the same full-sized Fiji GPU, many people wondered just how they would be able to pull it off. Using 4096 stream processors, a 4096-bit memory bus with 4GB of HBM (high bandwidth memory) and a clock speed rated "up to" 1000 MHz, the new AMD Radeon R9 Nano looked to be an impressive card. Today, PC Perspective has a review of the R9 Nano and though there are some quirks, including pronounced coil whine and a hefty $650 price tag, it offers nearly the same performance as the non-X Radeon R9 Fury card at 100 watts lower TDP! It is able to do that by dynamically adjusting the clock speed from ~830 MHz to 1000 MHz depending on the workload, always maintaining a peak power draw of just 175 watts. All of this is packed into a 6 inch PCB — smaller than any other enthusiast class GPU to date, making it a perfect pairing for SFF cases that demand smaller components. The R9 Nano is expensive though with the same asking price as AMD's own R9 Fury X and the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Readers have also submitted links to reviews at Hot Hardware and Tom's Hardware.
Not as HD as (Score:1)
175W in a SFF case? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:175W in a SFF case? (Score:4, Insightful)
This card is not aimed at people who are upgrading their POS SFF from a major manufacturer. It's aimed at people who buy a $200+ case and put a $200 motherboard into it. SFF cases go on up past $500 with a 475W power supply included, more than enough juice to run one of these cards. It's exactly the kind of thing I want for my next PC, which I will probably spend more than $600 on... except that I don't want to buy an AMD video card. And that machine will likely not have an AMD processor, either, like the one I'm using now does.
Re: (Score:3)
This card is not aimed at people who are upgrading their POS SFF from a major manufacturer. It's aimed at people who buy a $200+ case and put a $200 motherboard into it. SFF cases go on up past $500 with a 475W power supply included, more than enough juice to run one of these cards. It's exactly the kind of thing I want for my next PC, which I will probably spend more than $600 on... except that I don't want to buy an AMD video card. And that machine will likely not have an AMD processor, either, like the one I'm using now does.
I made such a "gaming SFF" once, but only once. It was hot, it was loud and though it lowered the bulk you still needed everything else but the box. I can understand gaming laptops for portability. I can understand <50W SFF boxes for casual or HTPC use, particularly passively cooled. But if you want a system drawing >250W, you spend ridiculous amounts and cripple performance compared to a slightly bigger mATX mini-tower that can fit and cool a full size card. Unless you have some really odd requiremen
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Unless you have some really odd requirements I don't see how saving a shoebox's worth of space is a luxury product.
Space is itself valuable. It costs more to buy, build, and/or maintain more square footage. And then there's convenience, for those who want to trundle their PC around from place to place, but who won't settle for mobile parts. Most of the space in my PC is empty, and I don't mean that in some metaphysical sense or in a technically-due-to-physics sense, I mean there's just a lot of unused space in the box which I never intend to use. I chose my case based on price point, mostly, so that's what I got.
Re:175W in a SFF case? (Score:5, Informative)
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That's what she said (Score:1)
Given the headline... (Score:1)
I can't believe that the first dozen posts aren't all variations on "9 inches of fury just like my dick!"
Yup, that's low hanging fruit. Just like my dick.
Is this what trolling feels like?
Re: (Score:2)
AMD was betting the farm on their manufacturers moving to 20 nm, except it didn't happen.
Re:Yawn. Last Ditch Cash Grab. (Score:5, Insightful)
nVidia: Pushes closed gameworks devtools with so much tessellation that triangles become smaller than pixels. Hampers performance on nVidia cards, severely hampers performance on AMD cards. Gameworks contracts stipulate that nVidia has executive control over the final shipped code.
AMD: Bets big on hardware capable of asynchronous computing going back to GCN 1.0 (2012). Creates proof of concept API (Mantle) used in a handful of games to show it is faster than DirectX 11. Microsoft later assimilates all the key ideas of Mantle into the DirectX 12 specification.
The result: AMD users have to spend 5 minutes googling and turning down tessellation settings to below placebo-levels to get acceptable frame rates on some current titles like Witcher 3. nVidia users will have to buy new cards to run DirectX 12 titles natively; their current cards can emulate async compute successfully but cannot harness any of the performance benefits.
The difference: While they have both been stuck on 28nm for years, AMD spent their time and money on making structural hardware and API design improvements that would pay dividends later (not just in async compute; AMD has now shipped a product with HBM, another promising technology). nVidia spent their time and money on rent-seeking profit schemes that can best be described as hurting their customers less than the competition.
Even though AMD and nVidia are basically tied for performance and value now on current titles, AMD cards have an interesting feature set. It reminds me of the GeForce 5800 vs. the Radeon 9700, where the major advantages of team red didn't become apparent until a year or so after release when DirectX 9 games ran slower and looked worse on nVidia's cards. I'm definitely interested in how this will play out with DirectX 12 games set to release in under a year (like the new Deus Ex).
I think 6 is a bit short. (Score:1)