AMD R9 Nano confirmed: launching in September for $650(Kshs.67,500)

Last week I reported on some leaked information about the AMD R9 Nano graphics card. Now AMD has unveiled the official specifications, along with a release date and pricing information.

The six-inch R9 Nano will be going on sale on September 10 for $650(Kshs.67,500), the same price as its full-sized R9 Fury X.

Surprisingly, the R9 Nano looks set to be very similar to the Fury X, despite being smaller and having a lower TDP at 175W. The Nano has 64 compute units, 4,096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 4GB of 4,096-bit high bandwidth memory, and 64 ROPs, all of which are identical to the bigger card. The core clock speed is the only difference, which AMD lists as “up to 1,000 MHz”, compared to the 1,050 MHz of the Fury X. It’s expected that the clock speed will be lower because of the lower power consumption. Our colleagues at Maximum PC believes that demanding workloads like Furmark that hit the thermal throttle could push the clock speed as low as 600 MHz, although games should be running at around 850-950 MHz.

The only other difference between the Nano and the Fury X is the cooling solution, with the Nano using air cooling rather than the water cooling of the Fury X. AMD is targeting an operating temperature of 75 degrees celsius, which it says is 20 degrees cooler than the R9 290X. The card’s thermal throttle point is 85 degrees, but AMD says that it should never reach that point.

AMD claims that performance is better in the R9 Nano than the Radeon R9 290X by 30 percent, and says that it is both the fastest and most power efficient Mini-ITX card available, which certainly looks to be the case. AMD has also released numbers which say the Nano has a 50 percent performance per watt advantage over the Fury X, thanks to its lower power draw.

So, it seems the Nano and the Fury X are essentially the same card, except the Nano is smaller and will use less power, while the Fury X strives for maximum performance. It will be interesting to see how they line up when we get our hands on one in September.