Hello all,
My first thread on this forum.
Thinking about buying an R9 Nano for $110 online. Is it worth it? Im gonna be putting it in an SFF system with the restriction of having the short ITX style GPUs.
I am wondering, should I look for a used 1060 6gb, which is usually a little more expensive.
Will the 1060 overclocked beat the nano?
Power consumption is a concern for me but not a deal breaker (I ran an r9 390 for years.)
Anyways, feel free to chime in!
Power consumption might not be a deal breaker, but cooling ability is the larger concern here.
The R9 nano thermal throttles at stock speeds. Add that to the fact that you’re putting it in an SFF case and I’d definitely recommend a 1060-6G.
Are you on a tight budget or just looking to save a bit?
Ill be using a K39 case aka M4X with a 500w flex atx psu. Its a chinese case from Taobao.
I am trying to be on a tight budget. I am just doing a minor refresh on a rig I have. It currently runs an i5-4590s, low voltage DDR3 samsung wonder ram, and LP 750ti using a 190w Pico PSU.
I really do not want to spend more than $120.
Well, the fury nano would fit the budget.
There’s nothing wrong with the nano, but I’m seeing some used 1060s on craigslist for $120 locally and my prices are typically on the high end.
My local market really sucks! People selling old crap for way too much money,
I have checking the fleabay and other forums, if anyone has any other suggestions as to cheap small gpus that are pretty good, I am open to suggestions!
I own a Nano and still use one. It depends on your PC cooling.
I bought mine for $289 a couple of months ago. So for $110 it’s a happy butt smacking good deal.
IMO don’t expect to do more than 1080p with newer titles tho. All of them are rape on the VRAM
That’s really the weak point of it. I imagine they wanted to do more VRAM but first gen HBM was limited to 4G.
Well guys, I did it, just paid $112 shipped for the card on Offerup. I suspect he was mining on the cards as he has a small handful of them. Not too worried about that, as long as it works and isnt trashed.
Yeah the 4gb frame buffer is a little sad, but I dont really need to boost everything up to the max.
As far as thermals, I plan on seeing if I can undervolt the core it a little bit and bump the memory frequency a bit.
I have a 1440p 60hz monitor, so I am shooting for medium settings. Also using this for 1080p HTPC duties and TV gaming.
Thanks guys for all the input. Ill keep the thread updated!
There is an RX Vega 56 Nano that exists but it’s annoyingly hard to find
I have a Fury Nitro and I was able to undervolt to about 970mv at 1000mhz (from the 1050 stock)
Drop another 100mhz and you can probably knock nearly 100mv more.
Hey, welcome to the jungle… We have a lot of bananas for everyone so you don’t have tonight with the other monkeys…
Anyways, back on topic…
Great card.
And a bit slower, usually not much, but a little…
Maybe, maybe not …
It’s about 10% or something… Heavy OC of 1060 may beat nano, but then again, you may push the Nano a bit…
Anyways …
Nano isn’t really all that power hungry. It’s perfectly balanced fury card for power and performance… So yeah…
Thanks for the input!
I have been out of the loop for a while now, so more like welcome back to the jungle of PC enthusiast!
I finally hooked up my old SFF rig to my Brother in Law’s TV, and I am starting to get the itch again.
I have a good feeling about the Nano, especially for the price I paid! It should be here by next week.
Thank you all for confirming that
It’s mostly power throttling.
The R9 Nano has a decent amount of thermal headroom, but will power throttle fairly quickly. Simply increasing the power limit in Wattman locks the card to the 1GHz base clock. Once you’ve removed that power limit then you’ll find some games that will cause it to thermal throttle (i.e. anything that demands 100% GPU resources regardless of load like World of Tanks or ARMA III), but a pretty minimal increase in fan speed will keep that from happening.
The R9 Nano sets a lot of the foundation for how Vega is overclocked. Power limit up, voltage down. It will happily push up toward 1100MHz with a bit of extra fan speed, a minor undervolt, and a maxed out power limit. (Though in synthetic benchmarks you’ll run right into the power wall and see regressions in performance usually. 1050 - 1075MHz is usually where the the balance point is.)
It’s a good card still. Honestly it’s still usable for most games up to 1440p so long as you aren’t pushing massive AA at the same time. The rough modern equivalent in performance is the RX 590, though amusingly enough the R9 Nano uses less power.
Well I’m using a 290x and when I have a 1160 MHz core and 1450 memory overclock I’m faster than a 1060 Ti, although I’m drawing around 400watts. Isn’t the R9 Nano the exact same card but in a small form factor? I have also modded my GPU with 140mm high performance fans instead of the puny 60mm fans that come with it. IC Diamond for the paste, and high performance thermal pads for the VRMs. So the thermal throttle doesn’t set in until way later.
Anyway I love my card. I still get 100+ FPS in like every title I play. I’d say its a hard yes on the purchase from me.
No. The R9 290X is GCN 2.0 (1.1) with 44CUs. R9 Nano is GCN 3.0 (1.2) with 64CUs as well as HBM.
I love my r9 390 that I picked up years ago, it can play anything that I throw at it, but I wanted something smaller, and something more power efficient. I used an overclocked X5650. So think about how much power that thing was sucking up. (which was still less than my old AMD Bulldozer system with Xfire 7850s).
Especially since I moved back to Hawaii and electricity here is like $0.35 a kwh…
I’d buy teh shit out of an R9 Nano for that price.
they’re still a great card and will stomp anything available new for that price.
Also, the nano has more compute available than anything else you’ll get for the cost, and i think it will continue to age better.
Thanks for the reply! I was thinking that on raw power AMD cards haved age really well to their counter parts.
Plus I was kinda in disbelief on how cheap they have gotten. I haven’t been hardcore the PC hardware game since they were released new.
I think that assuming you are running 1080p or maybe 1440p the processing power in the nano will hold it in better stead than something like a 980, 1060 or other 4gb card(s).
I have a 24in 1440p monitor, and a 1080p TV.
Mainly I’ll be using it on the monitor.