AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: Small But Mighty Fiji Unleashed

Name: AMD Radeon R9 Nano
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 08:00 AM EDT

We also spent a little time overlcocking to see what kind of additional performance we could squeeze out of the tiny AMD Radeon R9 Nano. We kept things simple, and used the tools build right into AMD's drivers, but were still able to massage a few additional MHz from the card’s GPU, which helped boost performance somwhat. Unfortunately, memory clocks on the card's HBM can’t be manipulated with the current drivers.

To overclock the Radeon R9 Nano, we hit the Overdrive menu available in AMD’s drivers. First we cranked up the power target by 20%, maxed out the fan speed (which didn't do anything until the card was under load) and kicked up the GPU clock target by 5%. The temperature targer was maxed out by default at 85'C.

While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some incremental improvements in performance in the games / settings we tested. While overclocked a modest 5% (1050MHz peak, boost) and a modest boost to the power target, the card almost caught the Radeon R9 Fury. And it did so while remaining mostly quiet--the fan did spin up to higher-than-default speeds, but never got excessively loud at all. With more aggressive tuning, we're fairly certain some Nano cards will be able to catch a Fury and perhaps perform on par with a Fury X with some workloads.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, Mini-ITX, GPU, Nano, fiji

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com