News Custom SFF Radeon R9 Nano Rig Packs 10 TFlops Performance

AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano is an impressive SFF (Small Form Factor) graphics card that packs a lot of punch and shows what’s possible with the HBM architecture. DGLee managed to get a sample of the Radeon R9 Nano graphics card and made a custom SFF Mini-ITX rig with it that packs a total of 10 TFlops of performance under its hood.

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[Phuncz]

Look at that case, what an awesome design ! Hoorah for SFF !

 

[Vittra]

Looks fantastic. All these places getting Nanos and not [H] is beginning to not sit well with me though, when you run into things like this:

https://twitter.com/amd_roy/status/639930842727497728

 

[confusis]

SFFn didn't get one either!

 

[Phuncz]

A lot of sites didn't get them, which is confirming my suspicion that the Nano has (much) better binned Fury X chips.

 

[Vittra]

Do you mean with respect to availability? If that's what you are suggesting, I'm not so sure it's the motivation. That's what I thought it was originally, too.. but they did a giveaway for a Nano, and a lot of smaller sites / pro amd sources that aren't necessarily reviewers received them. They seem to be avoiding sites that either may not give them a favourable review, whether that be due to bias or simply misunderstanding the SFF niche it falls into. I only mention [H] as the guys there were already in the process of setup for small SFF-style rig to compare it to a 970 ITX. They didn't even have the 970 ITX before hand or the case - they bought both. They will probably try to acquire a Nano through alternate means.

It seems that for a site like [H] that they have such a close relationship to - remember, [H] and AMD hosted the FX experience events together - it's curious to shun them.

Edit - fixing sentence

 

[jeshikat]

I have a hard time believing some reviewers didn't get samples due to availability when they gave two of the Nanos to this guy, and he didn't even end up using the second card.

 

[Vittra]

https://twitter.com/amd_roy/status/639930842727497728
https://twitter.com/amd_roy/status/639930896880136192
https://twitter.com/amd_roy/status/640263343421321216

Jeez!

Apologies for ruining the intent of this thread Phuncz. Just a bit surprised at how this launch has played out.

 

[iFreilicht]

Damn that is one sweet mother of a build.

@Vittra well what's he gonna say? He can't really admit why they didn't give out samples to reputable sites but to smaller ones that aren't even reviewers.

 

[EdZ]

But that's exactly what he has done, with a totally unnecessary extra helping of implied impropriety on behalf of TechReport.

 

[iFreilicht]

Hm I don't think that's what he meant with "there will be fair reviews". It seems more likely to me that he wanted to find a reason why people would be concerned that some sites didn't get a review unit, and maybe thought that people value the fairness of these sites in particular. So in order to calm them down, he wanted to ensure that there would be fair reviews. Not the most logical way of thinking, but that's what I would imagine him to do.
Of course I'm being a bit of a devils advocate here.
Personally, it seems very shady to give sites that are known for their thorough and very objective reviews no review unit, especially when they show that there's no shortage in R9 Nanos at all.

 

[jØrd]

so much butthurt over fury launch
after they got busted overclocking review samples a few years back one would think AMD would have spent some time working out how to not fuck up their launches

 

[iFreilicht]

Holy crap they actually did that? Didn't even know about this, AMD wasn't of any interest to me at all in the last few years, but that's a huge fuck up.

 

[Phuncz]

Overclocking review samples ? Do you mean the uber-switch ?

 

[jØrd]

Overclocking review samples ? Do you mean the uber-switch ?

was it perhaps the 4550's that went out to reviewers OC'd slightly, or something close to that, i forget the exact nature of drama but i remember AMD being panned universally for it

 

[EdZ]

Not so much an overclock but extreme sample cherry-picking: R9 290x cards provided to reviews ran both faster and quiter than retail cards. Subsequent firmware updates to retail cards closed the performance gap somewhat (but not entirely) at the expensive of running the fan even faster.

 

[Phuncz]

Cherry-picking is done in most hardware review samples involving CPUs, GPUs, PSUs. AMD shouldn't be (solely) blamed for this.

 

[Vittra]

Didn't this just happen with certain 980 Ti's? The OC on the review units were actually higher than the retail samples? It's a consistent problem and something to always be vigilant of - It isn't an Nvidia vs AMD thing per se - the manufacturers will try to do it too, to appear more attractive to competitors.

 

[Phuncz]

Cherry-picking is hard to prove without multiple sources because it could just very well be a good chip at random. But The GPU manufacturers know how good a chip is before it gets soldered, which they can sell at a premium, reserve for higher binned SKUs or for "marketing purposes".

But I've seen nastier practices than that, like Nvidia's driver released just after AMD's Mantle driver, passively OC'ing certain GPUs by adjusting their thermal limit.

 

[EdZ]

But I've seen nastier practices than that, like Nvidia's driver released just after AMD's Mantle driver, passively OC'ing certain GPUs by adjusting their thermal limit.

I've been trying to find more info on this. So far, I've found one HardOCP article with a footnote saying they experienced higher temperatures with the 337.50 Beta driver, one German article saying they didn't see a temperature increase, and absolutely no further testing with any subsequent non-Beta drivers by anyone.