Behind all the benchmarking, the MO for reviewing graphics cards is pretty simple - you figure out how fast the product is and then compare it to rival products of a similar price. But with the AMD Radeon R9 Nano, things aren't so simple - it's a complete one-off and for the time being at least, entirely unique. It commands an extreme price-point because there's nothing else like it and that's what tends to happen in the PC hardware market. On top of that, we may well be looking at the first example a new breed of GPU, a revised take on what a halo product in this space might offer.
The R9 Nano isn't the fastest graphics card money can buy, but it compresses an extreme amount of graphics power into an absolutely tiny chassis. It's all down to the utilisation of HBM - high-bandwidth memory - which sees the traditional cluster of graphics RAM modules binned in favour of stacks of memory directly attached to the main processor. HBM is stupendously fast, but it's also highly compact, meaning that the board on which the components lie can be much, much smaller than a conventional card using standard GDDR5 modules. We've already had a preview of this with the Radeon R9 Fury X - which features a seven-inch board backed by a separate closed loop cooling solution.
The R9 Nano lacks the extreme cooling, instead using a more conventional heat-sink and fan. However, the board itself is even smaller than the Fury X, sizing up at just six inches end-to-end. Refactored with the burgeoning small form-factor PC market in mind, the Nano needs to be cool and quiet - and with that comes compromise. The Fury and Fury X - both using the same Fiji architecture with HBM - can consume around 275W during gaming. The Nano brings that down a notch to 175W, a factor of a significant drop in clock-speed. However, unlike the air-cooled Fury, it retains the full 4096 shaders of the top-tier model, with AMD telling us that the amount of cores in operation should mitigate the loss of the raw speed - something we'll address shortly.
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