While it’s always good to base your opinion on “independent” reviews, official marketing materials are just as important. Still, it is worth taking them with a grain of salt.

AMD Radeon R9 Nano is 30% faster than GeForce GTX 970 MiniITX

Yesterday we posted the full R9 Nano specs sheet, which revealed that the card features 4096 Stream Processors, just like it’s more powerful brother – Fury X. How they managed to reduced the TDP from 275W to 175W, while retaining 1000 MHz boost clock is yet to be answered. What is known however is that R9 Nano is faster than Radeon R9 390X based on Hawaii GPU, and possibly even NVIDIA’s GTX 980.

Although GeForce GTX 980 has TDP of 165W, it was never available in such a small form factor (Mini ITX). The most powerful NVIDIA’s GPU offered in such format is GeForce GTX 970. That’s why GTX 970 is taken as a point of reference. Does it make sense? Of course, but I would still rather see how it does against GTX 980.

Apart from the miniature design, AMD Radeon R9 Nano could just be the proper response to NVIDIA’s GTX 980/970 series, only one year too late. Still, the Nano has 4096 Stream cores, twice as much as GTX 980, and possibly a lot of overclocking headroom. This card was downclocked/tunned for a reason: to show that AMD Radeon graphics cards can be as power efficient as Second Generation Maxwell.

Pretty much the only question that remains is: how much does it cost? Does comparing it to GTX 970 mean we are looking at similarly priced solution? This could just be the perfect cure to AMD’s dropping market share.

Wait, did they just remove the sticker from Intel’s stock CPU cooler? Awkward.