While most of the attention was directed at the new Radeon R9 Fury X as well as Radeon R9 and R7 300 Series cards during their official Malaysian launch event earlier this week, AMD did bring a couple of surprises to the event. They came in the form of two upcoming graphics cards: the Radeon R9 Nano and a yet to be named graphics card that features dual Fiji GPUs.
Let’s start with the R9 Nano first which obviously has attracted a lot of attention when it was first announced at E3 2015. At a glance, one might easily mistake it as a lower end graphics card since it only measures at 6-inch – shorter than majority of high end graphics card out there. Obviously, AMD didn’t hide its intention to push the R9 Nano as the card to go to users that are looking into building a high performance small form factor PCs.
Built with a single thermal fan, the card is powered via a single 8-pin connector with expected TDP of 175W which is a full 100W lower than the new R9 Fury X and R9 390X. The card also contains three DisplayPort and one HDMI as its output ports.
According to AMD, the R9 Nano which also utilizes the brand new Fiji GPU with High Bandwidth Memory is able to deliver up to two times the performance density and performance per watt as compared to Radeon R9 290X. In other words, R9 Nano performs better than R9 290X despite its compact size but of course, the truth can only be known when the card hits retail shelves later this quarter.
As for the dual Fiji card, there are even less information available about it but the sample card that AMD showcased at the Malaysian Fury X launch event did provide a number of tiny details regarding the card. For example, the card seems to be shorter than AMD’s previous dual GPU graphics card such as the R9 295X2 and HD 7990.
Additionally, the card also should have 8GB worth of memory since each Fiji GPU chip has 4GB HBM module. Also visible are the card’s two 8-pin power connectors, three DisplayPort and one HDMI port. We should be able to hear more regarding the new dual Fiji card towards Q4 of 2015.
