The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size

While there never really was an era where video cards were small, the focus on size and power efficiency over the last couple of years feels a bit like a return to at least some earlier roots in the PC video card industry. After traditional blower style cards peaked at 300W at the turn of the decade while other cards reached as long as 13”, we’ve slowly but surely been backing off on the idea that a large card and a flagship card necessarily go hand-in-hand. To be sure, we still have large cards and powerful cards as these cards have virtues of their own, but with the GPU TDP race seemingly having reached its limit, large and powerful is no longer the one and only path.

Instead what we’ve seen is a greater variety in designs, especially as component integration and innovations such as SSDs bring down the footprint on overall computer sizes. MicroATX has gone from a niche to a proper market in and of itself, and at the more bleeding edge previously obscure and performance-limited form factors such as MiniITX have become a viable platform for high-end computing. This in turn has driven video card manufacturers to build designs for these systems, going beyond traditional blower and twin/triple-fan designs.

For AMD this shift has been especially evident in their card designs based their flagship Fiji GPU. Thanks in large part to Fiji’s own high degree of integration – HBM brings down the area needed for GPU + memory – the only “traditional” card in the Fiji lineup is the Radeon R9 Fury, which isn’t even AMD’s flagship card. Rather at the high-end AMD went over the top, opting for a high powered closed loop liquid cooling design in what is a reference single-GPU card. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum is the Radeon R9 Nano, which sees AMD push the limits on miniaturization and pack Fiji into a card just 6 inches long.

AMD first unveiled the R9 Nano back at their Fury X launch event, and the card was formally announced at the end of last month, with AMD confirming the full specifications of the product along with pricing and availability information. With retail availability finally upon us, today we’ll be taking a look at AMD’s miniscule monster and the niche that AMD is looking to carve out with the card.