Nano – meet her: AMD's Radeon R9 4K graphics card for non-totally bonkers gamers, people AMD will today launch the Radeon R9 Nano, a beefy graphics card designed to run comfortably inside tight spaces. It's aimed at people who want to build small-case PCs fitted with mini-ITX motherboards and relatively dinky power supplies: such setups need a GPU card that can do as much as possible without overloading the PSU or …
175W in a mini-ITX case is called a fan heater, not a piece of electronics. There is no way in hell you can dissipate that amount of heat in that little space unless you are pushing all of it outside the case straight away which is not the case (the heatsink has vents on top and on the side in addition to the exhaust).
So frankly, if marketed for that it is mismarketed from the start. You simply cannot stuff something like this in a mini-ITX case even if you severely under-clock it.
It will end up with the usual suspects - the shorter size improves airflow in a normal gaming case too.
I think only vents at the back of the card
Nope. Look at "how it is constructed" diagram.
It is a bog standard intake from "face" fan pushing onto a bog standard radiator matrix. Airflow will be coming out half from the PCI bracket (so far so good), but other half from the from the other side into the case. There will be minor overspill from the top side too.
So you are looking at 50% of 175W recycled back into a book size (mini-ITX) case. Even the best ones (f.e. by Silverstone) have trouble dissipating > 80W. Pushing 90W into it from the card alone is a fried system outright.
Overall - pretty bad design. They could have done the cooling differently by moving the fan pushing everything out of the PCI bracket exhaust. It is non-trivial as the airflow reqs are quite high so it is difficult to have something that does not sound like a hovercraft.
"175W in a mini-ITX case is called a fan heater, not a piece of electronics. There is no way in hell you can dissipate that amount of heat in that little space unless you are pushing all of it outside the case straight away which is not the case (the heatsink has vents on top and on the side in addition to the exhaust)."
Yes, 175W is quite high, but I really wonder about the Fury X TDP ... 275 W ?? Really ?! It's more than my total mitx new gaming build, which burns 250 W total on extreme load ! No OC yet, though.
And meantime, the ASUS GTX 270 mini IS overclocked, and as far as I can tell, doesn't throttle while gaming.
I went low power/small a few years ago and this is definitely of interest to me.
I don't need ultra-fast FPS; so long as the game doesn't judder, I'm perfectly happy. I'm currently running an A10 black as my gaming machine, and although the on-die graphics is adequate I'd like a little extra from the graphics so I can run some shaders.
But as a mature gamer who doesn't like to live with the window permanently open to expel heat, it sounds like this is just down my street.
The only people who would want this card at the same price as the Fury X are people who need lots of power in a really small case.
All other use cases can simply underclock their Fury X and see similar power/heat benefits as the nano with a better (water) cooling solution in place sending heat outside, and possibly even less noise as the watercooler is dealing with much less heat in an underclocked card than it was designed to.
The Nano Fury and Fury X are typical AMD : technically they should be superior, in reality they're not, as Nvidia and Intel are better at implementation and that's what counts.
The Fury series aren't appreciably faster than NVidia's offering, they're not any cheaper, the drivers are worse and the connectivity on the cards is worse unless running an all Displayport estate, or the Sapphire Fury custom card.
420 quid? Not a chance. 150-200, might be getting somewhere.
On Anandtech, a commenter 'stanleyipkiss' makes the point that this is a market test to prove the later release of the Fury X2 - two Nanos in one PCB. That might actually make sense.
It's the only thing that does however, as others point out, even ITX cases can handle full size cards.
This architecture will usher in the era of desktop supercomputing. Re-architecting a database to take advantage of HBM and implementing scientific applications in SPIR-V will allow you to do what before would have required an entire cluster.
True innovation doesn't come very often to our industry, this looks really exciting.
The price is all wrong here - it's obviously not that great of a cooler and it's an underclocked Fury chip. It should be cheaper as with any lesser product. It's not like it's smaller because of anything but the size of the cooler and reduced power requirements really. I mean, come on. Enough BS. Specialty form factor? How about Reduced Net Cost?
Smaller might mean more expensive if you need more expensive materials to move the heat faster, but I agree - this looks like trying to sell a bin-sorted chips as premium. That's a business which apparently doesn't want to be seen as trying to do its best for its customers. It's accountancy-driven. It's a shame. I want AMD to do well but they just keep messing up.
Am I the only one who wants a pseudo-all-in-one? If I've got a large screen, hide the cpu/graphics behind it in a couple of boxes with large, slow fans, maybe with water cooling if the angles are hard. I like all-in-one tidiness but if I wanted a laptop-spec, I'd get a big screen and a laptop. ITX has missed the boat a bit. We need a new hidden-behind-the-screen form-factor standard.
I've got a slightly aging but still quite well spec'd out Shuttle XPC gaming rig that something like this would be *perfect* for. Yeah, the price is a little high but damn if those aren't some good specs for something that size. Most cards designed for smaller cases aren't particularly powerful beasties so this makes for a pleasant change.
3 display ports is also rather spiffing eh wot! :-)
Rather telling that they compare this to a GTX970, a card which costs about half as much. Meanwhile the GTX980, which cost $549 at launch and can be found much cheaper now the GTX980Ti and TitanX are out, uses less power and massively outperforms it (GTX980 is about on par with the full R9 Fury X, the Nano doesn't come close).
So why would you actually want to buy this? If you want performance or efficiency, Nvidia still win by a country mile. If size is all important, you have to pay double the price to get something that only barely outperforms the Nvidia equivalent. AMD used to be good at making low to mid-range GPUs at a decent price. Now they seem to be handing the price advantage to Nvidia without compensating in any other area. It's not really surprising which company is the one actually making a profit.
There are reasons to expect that AMD will benefit significantly from Vulcan and DX12 , when nVidia will stagnate. There is only one benchmark for DX12 at the moment (at ArsTechnica) where much older card R9 290X is a match to 980Ti . The reason for this being that AMD has parallel pipelines, which scale much better with jump to Vulcan and DX12 than serial pipelines implemented by nVidia. All of that hardware in AMD was underutilised under DX11. If this proves to be correct, then this card will eat Titan X for breakfast on DX12 games.
Of course it's a bet and of course, we are years away from DX12 being sufficiently popular. Which leaves plenty of time for both AMD and nVidia to design/build/sell a new generation. Nevertheless, perhaps the tables are turning for AMD and all the investment they made in hardware design could start paying off. Eventually. If the don't go bankrupt first.
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