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AMD has revealed full details on its upcoming ultra-small form-factor graphics card - the Radeon R9 Nano. It's a unique offering: a compact six-inch GPU with the horsepower to run the latest games at 4K resolution. Featuring the full complement of hardware features found in the top-end Fury X, the card consumes a typical 175W, with operating volume rated at just 42dB.It's a far cry from the air-cooled R9 Fury and the water-cooled Fury X - both relatively power-hungry by comparison (and both rated at 275W). AMD's methodology in producing the cooler, more efficient Nano is simple enough - core frequencies drop from the 1050MHz found in the Fury X to around 850-900MHz depending on thermal and power budget. In producing the current Fury line, AMD pushed the Fiji chip close to its limits, and the more you push, the higher the power draw, and the amount of heat generated. It's not a linear relationship, so in dropping core frequency, AMD retains the bulk of the performance but saves a lot of power and temperatures reduce accordingly. Operating temperature at load is 75 degrees Celsius, but Nano only starts to throttle performance when it hits 85 degrees.
We asked AMD to clarify the expected performance level of the R9 Nano, and were told that the card should fall roughly into line with the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury. This card retains most of the Fury X's clock-speed, but sees shader count drop from 4096 to 3584 - despite this, in our review, we noted that the air-cooled Fury offered over 90 per cent of the Fury X's performance at 4K.
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