Introduction

Small form-factor (SFF) is serious business. What started out as an effort to build small desktops that are sufficiently powerful for everyday tasks graduated into a mad quest to miniaturize bleeding edge hardware, fueled by the emergence of BYOC e-sports events, which evolved from old-school LAN parties that turned into major money-spinning events, and people taking their desktops to the living room. Case and PSU vendors also chipped in with premium aluminum cases and the exciting new SFX power supply form-factor. Sadly this enthusiasm by the industry wasn't reciprocated by the consumer graphics companies.

High-end SFF graphics cards remained an oxymoron because a high-end VGA is not just the GPU, but also its cluster of memory chips and VRM, which typically take up enormous PCB real-estate and keep the card outside of SFF proportions.

There had been efforts to squeeze performance-segment chips like the GTX 960 and R9 285 into this form-factor, but they barely complement high-end CPUs and memory and aren't really GPUs that professional gamers can take to their events. AMD is on a mission to change that by launching the industry's first high-end SFF graphics card, the Radeon R9 Nano.



The Radeon R9 Nano is the fruition of AMD's gamble of integrating stacked high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and a 4,096 SP pixel-grinder into a compact multi-chip module that eliminates the need for external memory chips, freeing up large swathes of PCB area. This, in addition to HBM being more energy-efficient than GDDR5, enabled AMD to design the impossibly compact Radeon R9 Nano that can run anything at 1440p and doesn't shy away from 4K Ultra HD. The card draws power from just a single 8-pin PCIe power connector and has a typical board power rated at just 175W, making for a cracker of a proposition.

AMD is placing this card as a "co-flagship" entry into its product-stack, right up with the Radeon R9 Fury X. The two products share the $649 price-tag. Think of this as AMD's attempt at a halo product akin to NVIDIA's GTX TITAN family because NVIDIA has absolutely no answer to this product.

What makes this product particularly interesting is its power management. It retains the core configuration of the R9 Fury X, with all its 64 GCN compute units enabled, which works out to 4,096 stream processors and gigahertz clock speeds at just a typical board power of 175W. In comparison, the R9 Fury X and its 3,584 SP sibling, the R9 Fury, are rated at 275W. AMD has obviously worked some miracle in bringing its typical power draw down by 36 percent.

Price-wise, AMD is asking a hefty $649 for the R9 Nano, which limits its affordability to only the most enthusiast small-form-factor system builders.

We also purchased a retail Sapphire Radeon R9 Nano, and its results are included in this review as well.

Packaging

We only received a bare card from AMD. Retail cards will come with the usual accessories, like documentation, driver CD and power cables.

The Card

The R9 Nano is AMD's smallest card to date. It is dominated by the large fan, and a backplate is not available. Dimensions of the card are 15.5 cm x 11.0 cm.


The R9 Nano is really tiny compared to the R9 Fury X and GeForce GTX Titan X.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three full-size DisplayPorts and one HDMI port.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.


A physical CrossFire connector is not present as all Fiji-based GPUs send their CrossFire data via the PCI-Express bus.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back).

A Closer Look

AMD's cooler uses a vapor chamber baseplate to quickly remove heat from the GPU. You can see a single heatpipe peek out on the right side of the picture, used to cool the VRM circuitry.


Power delivery requires a single 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 225 W power draw.


AMD's card comes with a dual-BIOS switch that lets you toggle between two identical BIOSes, which will come in handy in case of a failed BIOS flash.


AMD is using a IR 3654 voltage controller, which is very similar to the IR 3567 voltage controller on the R9 Fury X and R9 390X/290X, just with support for fewer power phases. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well-supported in overclocking software.


The HBM memory chips are made by Hynix. They are specified to run at 500 MHz. The two stacks pictured in the photo are each comprised of five stacked silicon dies, four DRAM and one controller. A total of four stacks are installed, sitting on the silicon interposer (the colorful parts), together with the large GPU die.


AMD's Fiji graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with 8.9 billion transistors on a 596 mm² die.