A hefty price tag: AMD’s R9 Nano is priced locally

AMD launched its gaming-focused Radeon R9 Nano in August, promising the fastest Mini ITX graphics card ever made.

The R9 Nano allows ultra-compact PCs to handle 4K gaming, and features AMD’s Fiji graphics chip.

Local retailers have now listed pricing for the GPU, which is as follows:

Rebel Tech

Asus R9 Nano – R11,999
Sapphire R9 Nano – R11,199

Evetech

MSI R9 Nano – R12,999

Wootware

PowerColour R9 Nano – R10,999

The R9 Nano’s specifications are detailed below.

AMD Radeon R9 Nano
Process	28nm
Stream Processors	4,096
Engine Clock	Up to 1,000MHz
Compute Performance	8.19 TFLOPS
Texture Units	256
Memory	4GB HBM
Memory Bandwidth	512GB/s
Board Power	175W
Standard	PCI-E 3.0
API Support	DirectX 12, Vulkan, OpenGL 4,5, Mantle

The R9 Nano launch video is embedded below.

Impressive as the R9 Nano most certainly is, offering performance equivalent to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 at only half its size, we still believe it’s too expensive for what it is.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the mini-ITX target market is unlikely to require a card with the grunt of the R9 Nano.

Media PCs won’t require anything like an R9 Nano, and gamers are unlikely to purchase a mini-ITX card for a primary gaming rig.

Granted, some gamers may want a diminutive gaming rig, for the sake of portability or limited space, but the GTX 980 will still fit in most mini-ITX environments and costs as much R3, 100 less if you purchase Galax’s GTX 980 from Wootware.

Besides, for full or half tower setups, and for roughly the same price, you can purchase the faster R9 Fury or GTX 980 Ti.

AMD has designed a great little card, one should allow for some fantastically powerful ultra-compact PCs, like this one, but it’s more neat than it is feasible.