Friday, September 4th 2015
AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
There won't be a Radeon R9 Nano review on TechPowerUp. AMD says that it has too few review samples for the press. When AMD first held up the Radeon R9 Nano at its "Fiji" GPU unveil, to us it came across as the most promising product based on the chip, even more than the R9 Fury series, its dual-GPU variant, and the food-processor-shaped SFF gaming desktop thing. The prospect of "faster than R9 290X at 175W" is what excited us the most, as that would disrupt NVIDIA's GM204 based products. Unfortunately, the most exciting product by AMD also has the least amount of excitement by AMD itself.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
Are we sourgraping? You tell us. We're one of the few sites that give you noise testing by some really expensive and broad-ranged noise-testing equipment, and more importantly, card-only power-draw. Our reviews also grill graphics cards through 22 real-world tests across four resolutions, each, and offer price-performance graphs. When NVIDIA didn't send us a GeForce GTX TITAN-Z sample, we didn't care. We didn't make an announcement like this. At $2,999, it was just a terrible product and we never wished it was part of our graphs. Its competing R9 295X2 could be had under $700, and so it continues to top our performance charts.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
759 Comments on AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
I guess DoA is what this feels like.
In case of nano, Price and performance just doesn't have a good balance. Yes AMD said 30% using their idea of settings for a game, but end users probably only be around 5-10% at best faster then a card of competing size, when your card cost 2x the price the other one. Can't pull what Apple does and have mass amount of people blinding throwing money down.
I will be surprised if the Nano performs as well as the Fury X and I suspect this is the reason AMD is being selective about which sites are being sent one for review.
What remains to be seen is if the demographic holds up. AMD are positioning the Nano above the GTX 970 mITX based on its 4K ability. If the card is truly 4K capable then it hits the mark. If the performance is geared towards 1080p/1440p....not so much.
I'm actually wondering what the scenario would be if the roles were reversed. What kind of reaction would there be if TPU refused to launch review a card that AMD was launching that would top the metrics charts that W1zz uses (perf/$, perf/watt, overall performance)? It wouldn't matter, right? Plenty of bloggers and other sites to review the card?
I have always had AMD/ATI graphics Cards ( ever since 3Dfx got bought out by them and gutted )
Would i buy or recommend a nano
Not until it has had lots of Believable Reviews and there is a price Drop and they become popular sales on Flea bay as for new right now i recommend AVOID LIKE IT's INFECTED AND WILL GIVE YOU THE CLAP. ( PERSONAL OPINION ONLY )
I've never paid more than 175 for a GPU... With inflation that comes to about 250 I guess... maybe 300. I'd rather just not play the new games, or play them on low settings until I can get a faster GPU. I can see my 5870 (no, I didn't buy it new) lasting for another year at LEAST--that's probably blasphemy to a lot of you guys.
I was honestly expecting the Nano to be cheaper than the Fury and Fury X. Which is why I was so excited for it.
I found that interesting though that the 6870s had more compute to use but a lot of the issues were coming out of trying to stream video memory from system memory.
It's insane because AMD could have done many things to nano and none of this makes sense IMHO. I kind of want to stop talking about it until we can see ourselves some legitimate information about what Nano is and what is can do because no one really seems to know "fo sho".
I dunno why AMD even bothered with the 300 series. They could have scrapped the whole line and just made one mid-range fiji-type setup.
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my choice was Dictated by wanting TV on the Pc my Last 3DFX Card was the Voodoo 3500 Tv
NVidia at the time and still never done proper TV cards if they had i might have considered buying one as it was i went for a AIW 9800se
Still got the Voodoo 3500 in its retail packaging and it still works
you can see photo's in the nostalga thread
You're right. Nvidia never really cottoned to the TV tuner graphics card concept. I remember installing a few FX 5200/FX 5700 Personal Cinema cards back in the day, but wouldn't recommend one to my worst enemy.
Ati got the graphics card tuner combo quite well sussed out pity they stopped production and updating that range would be nice if they still done it just to free up a slot for other use
modern m/b seem to lack slots these days
Wizz can be to some, a bit of a green team lover. But then again I believe he calls a spade a spade and dosnt blow smoke up ppl's ass like some other un-named sites do..
I love AMD, but would I buy this card? Nope not in a million years.. There price is way off base for this card. If you ask me this card should be in the $280 ish range and that's taking the American dollar in hand... So if I were to buy it I'd expect to walk Into a local store and with taxes I'd be happy with paying $320 where I live.. But $600 plus from what they're saying?
@amd, this is for you, are you guys really trying to kill what you have left of a company over this? Here's a rope, there's a tree... Swing baby swing
There are many reasons why I think we (along with sites like TR) didn't get this card:
Mine is the tin hat with the full length neck guard.
( complete with full coverage cricket Box woven silver foil and Kevlar )