AMD makes the R9 Nano graphics card official -- small, powerful, and glorious!

When it comes to building a gaming PC, there are many choices the builder can make. Of course, you want to look at performance and cost, but for many people -- myself included -- there is also appreciation for the design and engineering of the hardware.

Today, AMD officially announces a graphics card that is a feat of both engineering and design prowess -- the amazing R9 Nano. Quite frankly, the card was hardly a secret, as the company previewed it back in June. Now, however, we have official specs, price and a release date for this marvel of engineering!

"With 30 percent more performance and 30 percent lower power than the previous generation AMD Radeon R9 290X card, the 175W AMD Radeon R9 Nano is the world's most power efficient Mini ITX enthusiast graphics card. The six-inch long, air-cooled board represents a new class of graphics card, enabling gamers, PC modders, and system integrators to build compact, unique, ultra-small form factors that have never before been possible, opening the door to new, sleek PC designs that are no bigger than a home DVR or videogame console, and look every bit in place beside them", says AMD.

Matt Skynner, corporate VP and general manager, Product, Computing and Graphics Business Unit at AMD explains, "with the Radeon R9 Nano graphics card, AMD is enabling 4K class gaming in your living room in an exceptionally quiet, ultra-small design built to excel in today's games and on the latest APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. There simply is nothing else like it. Our Radeon graphics line-up is ushering in a new era of PC gaming delivering remarkable performance, unmatched GPU designs and groundbreaking technologies. Today is a revolutionary moment for PC gaming, and we are proud to add this distinct product to our well-rounded AMD Radeon R9 graphics lineup".

AMD shares the following R9 Nano statistics versus the R9 290X

• At 175W typical board power it’s up to 30% lower power than the Radeon R9 290X card
• At a 75ᴼC target operating temperature, it’s up to 20ᴼC cooler than the Radeon R9 290X card
• At 42dBA, it’s up to 16dBA quieter than the Radeon R9 290X card

While the R9 Nano will work fine in a full ATX system, its short stature makes it ideal for a mini ITX build (check out the above chart to see how it destroys NVIDIA's GTX 970 mITX). In other words, if you can accommodate a bigger card and you don't care about energy savings, you can get more performance for the same price.

But what is the price? AMD lists an MSRP of $649 and I expect retailers to charge exactly that since demand is likely to be high. You will be able to buy it starting on September 7th.

Will you buy the R9 Nano? Check out the below specifications and features and tell me in the comments.

Features

Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) Yes
Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC) Yes
High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Yes
AMD FreeSync Technology Yes
AMD LiquidVR Technology Yes
4K Resolution Support Yes
AMD Eyefinity Support Yes
AMD CrossFire Support Yes

Specifications

Process 28nm
Stream Processors 4096
Compute Units 64
Engine Clock Up to 1000 MHz
Compute Performance 8.19 TFLOPS
Texture Units 256
Texture Fill-Rate 256 GT/s
ROPs 64
Pixel Fill-Rate 64 GP/s
Z/Stencil 256
Memory Configuration 4GB HBM
Memory Interface 4096-bit HBM
Memory Speed / Data Rate 500MHz / 1.0Gbps
Memory Bandwidth 512 GB/s
Power Connectors 1 x 8-pin
Typical Board Power 175 W
PCIe Standard PCI-E 3.0
API Support DirectX 12, Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5, Mantle