The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTThe Competition
One of the issues in testing an unusual card like the R9 Nano is figuring out what to test it against. By and large most of the video cards we receive are, well, large, which is suitable for evaluating high performance cards, but presents a bit more of a problem when looking for something to compare the R9 Nano to.
Anticipating this problem, AMD offered to send us a competitive NVIDIA card as well, ASUS’s GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini. As a matter of policy we typically don’t accept rival cards from a vendor in this fashion in order to avoid testing pre-arranged (and contrived) scenarios. However in this case we had already been looking into NVIDIA Mini-ITX cards for this review and had previously settled on trying to get one of the GTX 970 minis, so we opted to break from standard policy and accept the card. As a result we want to be transparent about accepting an NVIDIA card from AMD.
Left: AMD Radeon R9 Nano. Right: ASUS GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini
The Test
Meanwhile after some early experimentation on how to best evaluate the R9 Nano, we have opted to break from tradition a little bit here as well and test the card in two rigs. For our published numbers and for the purposes of apples-to-apples comparisons we are using our standard AnandTech GPU Testbed, a full-tower ATX system.
However in order to also test the R9 Nano in cozier conditions more fitting of its small size, we have also run a limited selection of cards within a second testbed as a control. Unfortunately we don’t have any true Mini-ITX systems around that are suitable for testing the R9 Nano, but for the next best thing we have turned to our frame capture workstation. Based on a Silverstone Sugo SG09 microATX case, this rig is built around a Core i7-3770 and typically houses our frame capture hardware for frame time analysis. For our testing we have pulled this out and set it up with some of our video cards in order to ensure that these cards operate similarly in cramped conditions.
The AnandTech microATX Video Capture Workstation w/R9 Nano
By and large the microATX case simply confirmed our results on our regular testbed after accounting for CPU differences, satisfying that testing in our larger regular testbed wasn’t unfairly impacting any of our major cards. However we’ll revisit the microATX case for our look at power, temperature, and noise.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 Fury X ASUS STRIX R9 Fury AMD Radeon R9 Nano Club3D R9 390X 8GB royalQueen OC (Underclocked to 1050MHz) AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 285 AMD Radeon HD 7970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 ASUS GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 355.82 AMD Catalyst Cat 15.201.1102 |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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brikbot - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
*capacitor ;)tipoo - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Nah, capacitors are the big cylindrical oneshttp://www.thenakedpc.com/dan/Bulging_Capacitors/c...
Resistors are the little ones scattered all over motherboards and other PCBs
https://www.google.ca/search?q=motherboard+resisto...
extide - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
No, those are capacitors. They are for decoupling for the GPU power rails, and that's why they have to be right under the GPU as it's as close to the chip as they can get.Furthermore, you can see the designations on the PCB are Cxxx indicating again that they are capacitors.
SMD resistors and capacitors can look identical. You are thinking of electrolytic capacitors (the big round ones) where as these are ceramic capacitors. Also the large black ones with a grey line on the side which are on the opposite side of the PCB relative to the MOSFETS are tantalum capacitors. There are MANY types.
However one rule of thumb that is not always true, but usually is, the tan colored small SMD devices are usually capacitors whereas black ones tend to be resistors, although I stress that this is not always the case. Best way to find out is look at the component designation on the board, if they start with C they are caps, and resistors will start with R.
brikbot - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
This exactly. And a good example of an exception are film capacitors, which tend to be black.brikbot - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Regarding power consumption for gaming vs FurMark: what impact could AMD's drivers be having? As in, we see cases where the AMD cards are CPU limited and nVidia's cards are not, implying that the AMD drivers drive a higher CPU load that nVidia. This would make sense in my mind with FurMark which loads the GPU down without really applying any loading on the CPU. I guess I'm wondering if the higher power load in gaming, being measured from the wall, is being driven by a higher CPU load as the drivers try to keep the GPU fed whereas in FurMark the drivers do not have the same work, letting the CPU idle, resulting in the lower power numbers.It might make an interesting metric to check in the future, given DX12 changing the impact of drivers.
slapdashbr - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Furmark draws substantially more power at a given clock speed than... anything else. It's like intel burn test. It's an unrealistic workload.Daniel Egger - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
"GTX 970 is also cheaper and designed to draw less power"Not true, for some stupid reason most mini GTX 970 draw more power and require 2 PCIe connectors.
extide - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Requiring 2 connectors doesnt mean it draws more power, and they are probably 2x6pin which is rated for the same as 1x8pinDaniel Egger - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
True, there's still the problem that a few mini PSUs only have 1x8 pin PCIe connector and the cards will not start if only one is connected. I'd rather not fool arounds with Y-adapters or other tricks at this amp-age; that can go south rather quickly...Daniel Egger - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
"And while we disagree that this card is suitable for 4K gaming based on its sub-Fury performance, we’re including 4K results anyhow to serve as a point of comparison."WTF is this? "And while we disagree that this car is suitable for racing based on its sub-911 GT3 RS performance, we’re including lap times anyway to serve as a point of comparison."