PowerColor AXR9 NANO 4 GB PCl-E Graphics Card

Despite its size it's still a very powerful card that can handle modern titles. Might be a bit hard to get however it can still perform almost on the level of GTX 1070 (around 10% worse), the only problem is that it is louder and more power hungry. A decent 450W power supply should suffice.

The AMD Nano. Its a fairly unique card which I felt deserved a review. I did not buy it from Amazon as I had a voucher at the time for elsewhere, but hope the opinion remains the same. I am building a HTPC for use in my living room. For it I am using the Lian-Li PC-O5S which is a lovely product in itself.The nano is the icing on the cake. Its a lovely little card and in all my benchmarks it performs very well. Now I also had a AMD Sapphire Fury Tri-X which is essentially the full Fuji chip with a few cores snipped off to reduce cost compared with its bigger brother the AMD Fury X. So how does the Nano differ. Well it actually uses the Full Fuji chip found in its bigger brother, in fact they cherry pick the higher quality chips to go in this card for the better thermals and electrical performance. In turn to keep the smaller PCB, they only have 1 8 pin PCI-E connector and remove some power phases.Now what does this all translate to. Well something quiet interesting. In my benchmark testing via firestrike, I found that the performance of the two cards were identical when both were overclocked. The Fury achieves this via higher core clocks while the Fury makes up for it with less clock speed but having the full fat chip.The point I am trying to get at, is the fact you are comparing a full size, near triple slot card with a card half its size yet getting the same performance. In my books thats a pretty impressive achievement.Now finally I would like to add that the card at low loads is silent and very cool running. Its very impressive and idles below 30 degrees while normal game speeds go to around 70 degrees. Even then however the noise stays quiet.In all a very interesting card and I will eventually be putting it under water which will hopefully be even more impressive. I have included a Picture of the sapphire Fury I had in the case so you can compare the size different in the same case.**UPDATE**I mentioned that I will be putting the card under water and have now done so. The card is in a small loop and I have to say under water it preforms extremely well. For mine I am using the EK waterblock and the Nano seems to thrive. Temps will of course be dependent on your loop and radiator capacity but on average the card runs at any ware from 30-40 degrees, which for a custom loop may sound warm, but this is on a 240mm radiator with a CPU in the mix.Of course what this means is there is no thermal throttling. Second the card can seemingly be pushed much further. Prior to being put under water it used to top out at 1085 Mhz on the core and 550 Mhz on the memory. Under water this can be pushed to 1040 in benchmark and 1120 Mhz for daily use. This essentially puts its performance on par with its bigger brother the Fiji X also given a mild overclock. Not surprising as it is a full Fiji core.Long story short, with the price drop in the UK for this card, its an even nicer buy now.