AMD Radeon R9 Nano Drops to $499, Hits Critical Pricing Sweet Spot
If you’ve had your eye on AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano for the past few months, but were hesitant to push the button due to the card’s lofty price tag, we’ve got some excellent news for you this morning. The R9 Nano debuted in September at $649, but AMD’s official price cut brings the pricing closer to reality at $499.
The $499 price is effective immediately, and makes AMD’s mini-ITX-compliant, Fiji-powered graphics card a much more intriguing proposition for gamers that want to cram as much graphics power into a pint-sized form-factor. At the $649 price, the R9 Nano just wasn’t really an attractive proposition for many gamers, as its tangible power and heat savings were hard to justify at a $150 price premium. However, there’s really little reason to pass on the card at this price point.
The price cut puts AMD in a very peculiar position with the R9 Nano. The R9 Nano is using specially binned chips to achieve significant power savings over the other R9 Fury and R9 Fury X. However, the R9 Nano is now priced exactly the same as its R9 Fury sibling, while giving up very little with regards to performance. As a result, it will be interesting to see what effect this price cut will have on the R9 Fury’s sales going forward.
The R9 Nano is built on a 28nm Fiji XT graphics core, features 64 compute units, 4096 stream processors, and 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). More importantly for folks looking to trim power consumption, the R9 Nano only requires one 8-pin power connector (the R9 Fury and R9 Fury X require two) and features a typical TDP of 175 watts compared to 275 watts for its larger siblings.
For more on the R9 Nano and how it stacks up to the R9 Fury and R9 Fury X in performance, be sure to take a look at Marco’s extensive review.
