Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Tuesday , December 01, 2015
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Share:

Radeon R9 Nano Small Form Factor Overclocking Review

We take the AMD Radeon R9 Nano in our Corsair 250D small form factor case and find out if the Nano has the potential to overclock and match the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X card's performance. We will also find out what it takes to deliver a consistent, non throttled, clock speed while gaming.

Introduction

In the past month we have taken a deep-dive into exploring the AMD Radeon R9 Nano's gameplay experience in a variety of configurations. The AMD Radeon R9 Nano is a unique video card, created for a specific function and we have thoroughly evaluated this tiny, powerful video card in a variety of scenarios. This will be the last evaluation of the AMD Radeon R9 Nano from us, and we will end it on something fun, overclocking the AMD Radeon R9 Nano and seeing how far we can push its performance.

In our first evaluation of the AMD Radeon R9 Nano we took this tiny video card and built a system based on the AMD recommended usage of this video card. Basically we built the exact system AMD suggests this video card is made for utilizing a Cooler Master Elite 110 small form factor case that could only fit small form factor video card sizes. We collected all the data before new AMD Crimson drivers were released, so this is not a review of the Crimson drivers.

In that case we installed our XFX Radeon R9 Nano retail video card and compared it to the only other small form factor card there is, an NVIDIA GTX 970 GPU based GIGABYTE GTX 970 small form factor video card for a much cheaper price. We tested the gameplay experience of both video cards at 1080p and 1440p for a wide look at the gameplay experience delivered. The XFX Radeon R9 Nano crushed the NVIDIA GTX 970 GPU powered video card in this case, and did it much more quietly.

We then took our XFX Radeon R9 Nano and gave it some more breathing room in a small case, the Corsair 250D which can only fit a mini-ITX motherboard. Inside this larger case cooling was a lot better. We found this made a direct impact on allowing slightly higher clock speeds on the XFX Radeon R9 Nano. In this case we were able to evaluate full-size video cards and thus compared the Nano to its price competitive competition, the GTX 980 Ti and AMD Radeon R9 Fury X. We tested at 1440p and 4K pushing the boundaries of gameplay on single-GPUs to see what Nano has at 4K.

Article Image

Overclocking the Nano

Today, we are going to take the same system build as our last evaluation (in the Corsair 250D) and now overclock the XFX Radeon R9 Nano. The first question we have is can we push the Nano to AMD Radeon R9 Fury X performance? The AMD Radeon R9 Nano is after all using the same GPU as the Fury X. The Fury X has a 275W TDP and the Nano a 175W TDP. We want to find out if the Nano is capable of being pushed up to at least Fury X performance with that small headroom with the TDP.

Then we want to see if we can push it further, perhaps by increasing the voltage. We are also interested to see how high HBM can overclock. We will take our highest overclock and then compare performance and see how the Nano stacks up with an overclock. Very important to note, this review is using the exact same build from our last evaluation in the Corsair 250D case. The same hardware, the same games, the same exact drivers are being used.

Before we outright begin to overclock we want to see the effects increasing PowerTune and the fan speed make on the AMD Radeon R9 Nano GPU. On the following page we are going to show you three GPU clock speed graphs playing 30 minutes of Battlefield 4. We are going to compare the default GPU clock speed result with then increasing PowerTune to +50 and then PowerTune +50 plus the fan at 100%.

The goal is to find out if we can first get the Nano to stop clock throttling, which it does at default configuration. If we can't, we have no hope for overclocking at all because the Nano clock throttles at stock reference clock speed settings to begin with. Meaning the default clock is set to 1000MHz but it cannot even reach or maintain that clock speed to begin with at its default setting. If we can't at least get the card to maintain 1000MHz then we have no hope of pushing the clock speed even higher.

Following that page we will then dive into overclocking experiences, and then the performance experienced and then power and then conclusion.