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PCPer AMD R9 Nano review

zMeul
By zMeul
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Posted

This card should be $450-499, like the 980. This card isn't even nearly worth its price.

Unless AMD plans to only sell 10 units then they might have succeeded.

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Posted

someone is faking the results then... or the cards are not created equal.

 

I'll trust an anandtech graph years before i'll trust whatever that non-identifiable graph is.

 

Not sure. The results are quite varied.

 

7335_888_amd-radeon-r9-nano-video-card-r

 

1e637beb-d2ba-4d00-ac6f-0539abe9cf60.png

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Posted

650 dollars for such a card is little bit too much....

 

Compared to what? A gimped Titan X at 1k, or an EVGA 980ti with asic quality over 78 for 1k? This is a KOTH card of it's market place. But of course, for a standard case, you can get better for about the same. But that won't fit in the use case scenario this card was made for.

Watching Intel have competition is like watching a headless chicken trying to get out of a mine field

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Posted

yeah, except one caveat, I'm not in anyone's team - except Intel's  ^_^

yet .. you marked me a team green - that's a mistake I'm not willing to ignore

 

yes, I have a very huge boner for AMD and I never hidden it

No, no he didn't. He said exactly what you did, that you dislike amd, he never said you loved Nvidia.

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Posted

Great piece of engineering. Looks like 980 (or slightly quicker) performance in a tiny package.

For people saying that AMD should drop the price; they will not for now. Because they know that they will easily sell out every single Fiji GPU which they can produce. Due to limited supply of HBM it cannot be made in large quantities. Since they know they are going to sell out all every single unit they may as well make as much money from it as possible.

Once HBM supply is sorted only can they start thinking about lowering price to move more units and regain some market share...

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Wow, so much hate for what is actually a very good product (performance and power efficiency-wise). I can't believe how many of you don't understand what this products is and where it's meant to be used. Seriously, it's been explained countless times.  :rolleyes:

 

Honestly, the Nano exceeded my expectations. I was fully expecting severe throttling, crazy high temps and closer to 290x performance. I am impressed AMD pulled off such a powerful card in such a small form factor. 

 

It's a shame about the coil whine/buzz. I hope they can address that. I also stand by my opinion that they are asking a bit too much for this card, though I recognize it's a niche product. What you're paying for is the innovation and power efficiency - just like Ryan explained how it's like the low-power, yet still fast specialized Intel CPUs. 

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Remember when Titan Z was released?

2x Titan for 3x the price!

Sure.. Some people were complaining about that too but not to the extent I see people hating on Nano.

Yet Nano makes a lot more sense for its target market than Titan Z ever had IMO.

There was a lot of issues with Titan Z too.

Cooling, throttling, acoustics, etc..

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Great piece of engineering. Looks like 980 (or slightly quicker) performance in a tiny package.

For people saying that AMD should drop the price; they will not for now. Because they know that they will easily sell out every single Fiji GPU which they can produce. Due to limited supply of HBM it cannot be made in large quantities. Since they know they are going to sell out all every single unit they may as well make as much money from it as possible.

Once HBM supply is sorted only can they start thinking about lowering price to move more units and regain some market share...

Supply and demand, simple economics here. they can't even make fiji gpu fast enough with the current demand. When supply increases higher than demand, the price will drop.

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All in all it is a good product. No point arguing that..

 

But the price... honestly i think they should dumped the price to 500 USD.... sure they lose 150 USD...But at 500 USD, it would sell A LOT better, but also be a bit more reasonable...

 

A lot of mITX cases can actually handle the Fury X, including the radiator. Sure, it would be cramped, but say you buy a Fury X and downclock it by 50-75MHz, not only would it fit, but it would run A LOT cooler, and thus, it would maintain its speed inside of even a cramped case :|

 

 

my conclusion

AMD R9 Nano. Good product, too expensive.

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Remember when Titan Z was released?

2x Titan for 3x the price!

Sure.. Some people were complaining about that too but not to the extent I see people hating on Nano.

Yet Nano makes a lot more sense for its target market than Titan Z ever had IMO.

There was a lot of issues with Titan Z too.

Cooling, throttling, acoustics, etc..

not to mention that the Titan Z lost to the R9 295x2 in every conceivable benchmark...

 

at the time, the R9 295x2 cost around 1250 to 1500 USD... while the TitanZ came out at 3000 USD....

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But the price... honestly i think they should dumped the price to 500 USD.... sure they lose 150 USD...But at 500 USD, it would sell A LOT better

No it wouldn't. Right now they cannot be manufactured fast enough due to limited HBM supply. So AMD knows they are only going to sell xx number of units, they may as well sell it at a good margin. Lowering your price only makes sense to move more units and increase market share. If you cannot manufacture enough units to do that then lowering prices is pointless; just throwing away potential for making money.

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Looks very good. It seems like people don't understand that this is a card made for tiny builds. There are no other cards at this form factor, that can handle this, especially in DX12. So much fanboy in here, damn. This is a niche market product. Treat it for what it is.

 

Only issue is that they still haven't dealt with capacitor buzz. Either they don't know how or they are skimping out. Could be an issue with HBM.

I'm in this niche market. But if i'm spending $650 on a graphics card for my living room gaming pc it needs to output to todays 4k TV's. So it needs hdmi 2.0. For $650 bucks include the dp to hdmi 2.0 adapter or forget about it.

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I thought the nano was going to be cheaper than the fury... but it performs the same and is $100 more... 

 

 

idc how small it is. That isn't really what I call "value"

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I've had a pc in my living room since 2002. I've never run across a scenario where I ABSOLUTELY must have a case that is so small it cant fit a moderate sized video card, or cant fit a 120mm rad. If your buying a case that is so small it cant fit the fury x that is for personal aesthetic reasons and nothing else. If your living room has space for a 50+ inch TV, it can fit a decent sized mini itx case.

 

I could drop the fury x in my living room pc today no issues and it would be better because the heat would exit the case immediately instead of warming up the whole system cause me to have run the case fans louder.

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...sell A LOT better...

 

I think that is the problem, they don't have a lot in stock.

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With all those graphics being all over the place in terms of noise level, either shenanigans are going on (which I would be utterly SHOCKED if that were the case, I trust pretty much all of the sources of these reviews), or the noise is on a card-by-card basis.  Jayztwocents posted this short Instagram video of his Nano's coil wine, and yeah it's pretty noticeable...

 

https://instagram.com/p/7dM4ejALUL/

 

As far as price goes, yeah it's a bit higher than I would have hoped for but the market is for sure there.  For a while I was looking at building a mini-itx system in the Lian Li PC-Q30 which would not support anything longer or anything with a radiator attached.  I ended up going with the Silverstone FTZ01 so that it could fit my larger GTX 680 that got replaced, but not everyone wants that type of form factor.  It's a card for a specific purpose and a specific build, so I doubt they expected that this card would sell a ton of units to begin with.  The biggest issue is the coil whine because I can imagine that people that want to build a small system like this also want to build it as quiet as possible.

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Just as an aside... this may be me misremembering, I know I didn't pay it as much mind as I would have were it an issue I faced, wasn't a lot of the coil whine issue from "900 series past" due, in part, to situations where the card was rendering, uncapped, hundreds if not thousands of frames per second in static menus and the like? Didn't a lot of the coil whine stop when a driver implemented limit on such framerate extremes was put into effect?

 

I do not own one of the cards in question so this was just something I read in regards to it during the drama itself. If that is not the case, my bad. But, WAS that the case, and could there be similar issues at work here? Inductor whine is supposedly a predictable symptom to diagnose.

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oh dear:

 

AMD-Radeon-R9-Nano-Closed-Case-Gaming-Lo

 

Whats the issue? VRM usually runs between 90-120C so 100 is fine.

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oh dear:

 

 

Assuming the scale is linear those hotspots are backplate IC's. Even right next to them is double digits cooler.

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oh dear:

 

AMD-Radeon-R9-Nano-Closed-Case-Gaming-Lo

 

Oh dear:

 

01-PCB_w_600.jpg

 

Addendum: And that is on the actual VRAM, not the VRM like on the Nano. So the Titan X is worse off.

​

Watching Intel have competition is like watching a headless chicken trying to get out of a mine field

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  • Author

Whats the issue? VRM usually runs between 90-120C so 100 is fine.

they built this thing to go into mini-ITX cases, very little volume inside and the VRMs hitting 100deg is fine ...

I wonder how fast these cards will die due to repeated thermal stress

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they built this thing to go into mini-ITX cases, very little volume inside and the VRMs hitting 100deg is fine ...

I wonder how fast these cards will die due to repeated thermal stress

 

It says so right on the image, that those temps are in a close case. Hardly an issue, as these VRM's are probably rated at 120/130c+.

Watching Intel have competition is like watching a headless chicken trying to get out of a mine field

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they built this thing to go into mini-ITX cases, very little volume inside and the VRMs hitting 100deg is fine ...

I wonder how fast these cards will die due to repeated thermal stress

 

you do realize that most GPU's on the market run hotter then that right? so if this card will die then 980ti, titans, 290x, 390x all have the same problem.

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I want to avoid the flame war here but zMeul you do understand that VRM running that hot is kinda expected for air cooled cards? VRM gets hawt. 

 

VRAM getting that hot is actually a problem. 

 

The take away is that these cards are plain hot. Maybe too hot for comfortable SFF use, but still within limits that both AMD and Nvidia set for their cards. 

 

So can we, you know, chill? 

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