AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: Small But Mighty Fiji Unleashed
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.
