Powercolor Radeon RX Vega Nano Edition Preps For Computex Debut
The oft-leaked and frequently teased PowerColor Radeon RX Vega Nano Edition is not only a real graphics card, it's going to launch at Computex next month, PowerColor confirmed in an email. The company is pitching it as "the smallest Vega card in the market," but for "gamers who don't ant any performance compromises in a compact gaming system." In other words, it's a formidable GPU for small form factor (SFF) systems.
PowerColor did not reveal any specifications yet, though if it's taking the 'no compromises' approach, we would expect the card to stick with AMD's reference clocks. In this case, it's a miniaturized version of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and not the higher end Radeon RX Vega 64. That means it wields 56 compute units and 3,584 stream processors, presumably with a 1,156MHz base clock and 1,471MHz boost clock
Here's a look at the other different full-size SKUs compare in the Radeon RX Vega family:
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While PowerColor didn't reveal any detail specs, we can see some details in the photos it provided. One of them is the presence of two PCI Express power connectors (6-pin and 8-pin). The original prototype that was shown off at SIGGRAPH last year had just one 6-pin power connector, whereas the final design is consistent with recent leaks.
We can also see the display outputs—it has a single HDMI port and three DisplayPort connectors. They're all married to a double-wide bracket, which means this is a dual-slot graphics card just like the full-size version. And for cooling, there is a single fan that sits a little off center.
Cards like this one are built for SFF builds where a full-size graphics card might not fit. They're particularly useful for console-sized gaming PCs that take residence in the living room for playing games on the big screen TV. While it would have been nice if PowerColor could have shrunk the Radeon RX Vega 64 into a Nano card, the Radeon RX Vega 56 is no slouch—for the most part the full-size model out dueled a GeForce GTX 1070 in our testing, especially in DirectX 12 titles.
It will be interesting to see how PowerColor prices this card, and what actual availability will look like after it launches.