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
Well AMD, I am disappointed. I may not have been looking at getting one, but this is just.. one hell of a BS paper launch.
AMD are often expected to be much cheaper than Nvidia by reviewers, regardless of performance, they are often treated as the punch-bag among reviewers, yes AMD are not always perfect by Nvidia suffer a lot of problems with their products too and yet every little thing on the AMD side is pulled up and pastured all over the internet while Nvidia are seemingly always perfect, being an ex 290 owner and now a GTX 970 owner i know they are not, they have a lot of driver problems ecte and yet reviewers never tell you about any of it.
AMD are about to go bust, there will be no more competition, just one GPU Vendor in Nvidia.
AMD have them selves to blame for a lot of it but i also think reviewers have some responsibility in AMD's impending demise and they need to take a long hard look at themselves.
Lets hear about some Nvidia shit when it happens, including Windows 10 Driver problems, DX12 issues, random stuttering in their current drivers... if this was AMD it would be the biggest story on the net.
I have found a lot of what are to me some very unkind things said about AMD, and some very unfair reviews.... in the past yeah, i'm pointing not a finger at TPU i happen to think you are one of the better reviewers... but some of the reading around AMD in this past year looks almost like trolling, and this from apparently professional reviewers. its not good.
Also, your signature banner is not working properly.
Either way, hopefully the GPU is treating you well but, with that kind of money CFX starts getting incredibly enticing for the kind of performance is can give you back.
The Mantle review (if it's the one I'm thinking of) came about after AMDMatt started a thread which was basically a copy of AMD's Marketing Blog on Mantle..
I told Hilbert who immediately removed it then said he would do his own review, which he did about a week later. Make of that what u will.........
i mean really????????? quite obviously being deliberately dumb for an uneducated reader because they didn't want to upset Intel, Nvidia or Microsoft, or all.....
Mantle doesn't do anything? check this out.....
My point is it was only because of Wizzard and TPU that happened, so I find it ironic people would think this site was bias against AMD... I def don't think so....or Nvidia. :)
but i do think some in the reviewers world are partly responsible for what is about to happen with AMD.
Like many great GPU vendors of the past we will soon be reminiscing about another and what they did for the industry and how much of a loss they are to us all, by then its too late.
Yet Nvidia's problems are far less reported, they have issues with Drivers right now, you would not know it outside of their own forums which has been going crazy about issues these past few months.
Aside from that AMD have put a lot of work and money into a lot of good things, HBM and Mantle to name the most recent, As i have already said Mantle (Now Vulkan) was a pretty big and important thing and yet its reception among almost all reviewers was conspicuously underwhelming or outright dismissive of it.