we have made a ton of videos featuring The R9 Nano from AMD there was the
review that kicked it off that showed a badass little card that produced a
massive amount of performance for its size without this card I wouldn't have
been able to do my Fallout 4 bomb build and it was the ideal GPU for Linus' 7
Gamers 1 CPU build but we have received criticism here from people saying that
the Nano only really works in ideal thermal situations and that the 970 mini
from the other team is the real small form Factor King due to that problem is
there any weight to this argument let's
see Intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream
with their new core i76700 K and core i56600k processors check out the link in
the video description to learn more first let's introduce the competitors
starting with the AMD R9 Nano it features a Fiji core GPU with 4,096
stream processors and 4 GB of hbm or
high bandwidth memory running at 1 gbit per freaking second on a memory bus
width of 4,096 bits the whole thing has
a GPU boosts clock of 1,000 MHz and houses all of this within a 5 in x 4 and
38 in body which has done super well in
raw performance benchmarks in the past in the other Corner we have the ASUS 970
mini running a total of 1664 cacor and 4
gbt of gddr5 memory which is running at
7,10 MHz on a 256bit memory interface
the whole thing has a GPU boost clock of 1228 MHz and comfortably sits within a
frame that is 7.7 in by 4.8 in which has
also done super well in benchmarks in the past but more on the thermal and
price to Performance side of things looking back at the review of the Nano
we can see the differences clearly laid out in the benchmarking graphs the Nano
handily beats the 970 mini in everything
when looking at Raw performance when you break away from that and look at overall
wattage or thermal output the story changes and the 970 beats the Nano quite
easily as well and then finally they do
end up tying but in the performance per watt category the cards also have quite
the price Delta with in US funds the Nano coming at
$479 while the mini sits at a much more
digestible 299 and this shows in the dollars per
frame Benchmark where the Nano was literally the most expensive per frame
card we tested and the mini was literally the least expensive per frame
card we tested quite the polarization all of that being said those benchmarks
are a little bit dated and so far what we know is that if you want a faster and
smaller card you can grab the Nano and pay up about an extra 180 bucks but if
you can deal with the slightly bigger size don't mind a bit of performance
loss and want to save some pennies on your power bill you canot spend the
extra and go for the mini options are good and these two cards serve the small
form factor market quite well in their own ways and nicely complement each
other in a way that I personally think Fosters healthy competition instead of
blind fanboying which is pretty cool but
today we look at them again for one more
testing scenario I had issues with the Nano's performance in my Fallout bomb
and it took a lot for me to mostly fix
it most cases have adequate air flow for your GPU but not all of them the ones
that have very restricted GPU airflow that we have apparently left at Linus's
house for uh undisclosed reasons so what
we did to replace the cases that are apparently at Linus's house is we
grabbed the node 202 a solid small form
factor case from fractal if you want to see the review of that check up here and
then in order to restrict the air flow more because this can actually take a
full-size graphics card we grabbed a fractal modu vent from a Define R5 that
we had lying around and then just taped it to the side we then tested Crisis 3
Tomb Raider and Battlefront both with the cover on and with the cover off with
both cards upon initial investigation of
the raw average numbers the Nano does
throttle when the obstruction is introduced but not by enough and it
still kind of wins by significant amount in every single scenario but that
definitely is not the whole story the average FPS doesn't lie but it's also
not an accurate description of how it felt the mini didn't give a crap it got
a little warmer but performed exactly the same in all three games with or
without the obstruction the Nano throttled and throttled pretty hard
making the games feel sluggish and weird due to inconsistent clock speeds as the
card was fluctuating clock speeds throughout the test as it throttled and
then no longer throttled and Etc okay so
that's not great for the Nano but I don't necessarily think that this is
actually a big deal before you scream at
me allow me to explain we had to create this scenario this is a bad airflow
scenario that being said there are cases that will have highly restricted air
flow for your GPU but this just arms you with more information for the planning
phase of your build if you have an extremely airflow restricted scenario
either find a way to feed the Nano some more air or just take a step down to the
mini which can still handle it and be a
pretty badass card regardless tunnel bear is the easy to use VPN app for
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LTT did this information influence your opinion on these cards let me know on
Twitter at lukor LFR if you like this video thumbs up if you dislike this
video thumbs down if you thought this video was kind of like average but you
you're like these guys seem all right I guess I could watch more of their videos
click the Subscribe button don't forget to buy a cool t-shirt that isn't this
one cuz this is from Bastion I I wore it cuz like I'm going to PAX East soon and
I thought it kind of made sense don't worry about it you can click the link in the video description down below if you
want to use our Amazon affiliate code to buy anything on Amazon that would be
awesome or you can go to the Forum become a contributor there check out
this video which is the original review of the Nano because I don't know it's a
pretty sweet card