Radeon R9 Nano crushes the R9 290X in Unigine Heaven benchmark

Reportedly based on a fully unlocked but slightly downclocked Fiji XT, the same GPU that powers the impressive Radeon R9 Fury X, we’ve suspected for some time now that AMD’s 6 inch (approximately 15 centimetres) Radeon R9 Nano would be the most powerful mini-ITX GPU around.

It’s hard to see how any other card of its type could compete with 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 64 raster operations pipelines and a 4096-bit memory interface. After all, a bus that wide, in tandem with 4GB of high-bandwidth running at 1 GHZ, means 512GB/s of bandwidth.

Just for comparison, NVIDIA’s fastest mini-ITX card is based on the GTX 970, a fantastic card to be sure, but only capable of a little under 224GB/s of bandwidth. It’s no match for the Fiji XT, let’s put it that way.

Now, fortunately, thanks to the Chinese website iyd.kr, we’ve seen the R9 Nano in the wild, as it’s apparently ready for distribution to its selected partners.

AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano

Many are pinning the R9 Nano’s frequency at between 830 MHz and 900 MHz, as opposed to the Fury X’s 1050 MHz, but the R9 Nano is still going to be a phenomenal performer.

WCCF Tech suggests 890 MHz:

Category	Radeon R9 Fury X	Radeon R9 Nano	Radeon R9 Fury	Radeon R9 290X
GPU	Fiji XT	Fiji XT (TBC)	Fiji Pro	Hawaii XT
Stream Processors	4096	4096 (TBC)	3584	2816
GCN Compute Units	64	64 (TBC)	56	44
Render Output Units	64	64 (TBC)	64	64
Texture Mapping Units	256	256 (TBC)	224	176
GPU Frequency	1050Mhz	890Mhz (TBC)	1000 MHz	1000Mhz
Memory	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB GDDR5
Memory Interface	4096bit	4096bit	4096bit	512bit
Memory Frequency	500Mhz	500Mhz	500Mhz	1250Mhz
Effective Memory Speed	1Gbps	1Gbps	1Gbps	5Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	512GB/s	512GB/s	512GB/s	320GB/s
Cooling	Liquid, 120mm Radiator	Air, Single Axial Fan	Air, Custom AIB Solutions	Air, Single Blower Fan
Performance (SPFP)	8.6 TFLOPS	7.3 TFLOPS (TBC)	7.2 TFLOPS	5.6 TFLOPS
TDP	275W	175W	275W	250W
Power Connectors	Dual 8-Pin	8-Pin	Dual 8-Pin	6+8 Pin
GFLOPS/Watt	31.3	42 (TBC)	26.2	22.4
Launch Price	$649	TBA	$549	$549
Launch Date	June 24 2015	August 2015	July 10 2015	October 24 2013

*Table courtesy of WCCF Tech

Thanks to iyd.kr, we also have some Unigine Heaven benchmark results to report, and they’re promising indeed.

Radeon R9 Nano vs. R9 290X – Unigine Heaven benchmark

You’ll have to look close to see the results, but the gist of it is that the R9 Nano is more than twice as fast as the R9 290X.

These numbers aren’t to be taken lightly, especially when the Nano scores (according to WCCF Tech) around 26.6 fps in a 4K benchmark. Just don’t take them as guaranteed just yet.

Come the Nano’s release in August, we can’t wait to see the sort of performance compact PCs will manage.