Last week AMD launched what they call the fastest ITX graphics card available for mass-market. The Radeon R9 Nano sports the Fiji graphics core with HBM technology. It's basically the same GPU like on the Fury cards, but on a smaller PCB. Or, as Linus from LinusTechTips phrased it, exactly half of a massive dual-GPU Fury X.

The online press was divided about the Radeon R9 Nano graphics card. Not in the least because major publications like Techpowerup, Hardocp, and Techreport didn't get a sample for review. The audience of those website showed their dissatisfaction and on each of the site's forums we find massive discussion threads: TechPowerUp (740 comments), Hardocp (1022 and 545 comments), and TechReport (220 comments. People certainly talked about the card! We had a look at the reviews that were up on launch day and checked the overclocking experience and results.

AnandTech: "Overall we were able to overclock our sample to 1075MHz on the GPU and 550MHz (1.1Gbps) on the memory. However load clockspeeds were almost always under 1000MHz even with a generous 35% increase in the power target. Overdrive does allow for a larger increase – up to 50% – but with the R9 Nano featuring a less robust power delivery system designed to push less power than R9 Fury or R9 Fury X, we’re hesitant to increase the limit further without a better idea of what the card can safely sustain for extended periods of time."

Guru3D: "So the question begs, can you overclock a card like the NANO with the complex thermal and power limiters? Well, as it turns out, yeah... pretty well. We might not have voltage and proper memory control over this card just yet, we leave that alone. AMD however left the power limiter for what it is and you can raise it towards an extra 50%, combined with a maximum GPU clock frequency of 1070 MHz this card was stable. Obviously you now use more power, our TDP measurement peaked an extra 30 Watts to 249 Watts, not bad. During the overclock the 1070 MHz was incredibly consistent as we allowed the card to throttle towards it thanks to the increased power limiter. The end result is a product in the enthusiast class of performance, albeit we have to say it, more noisy as the fan spins up faster and at a higher pitch. None the less, it is definitely worth some checking out."

Bit-tech: "Extra performance with the R9 Nano comes in two distinct areas, overclocking and power management. Interestingly, AMD lets users unlock the power management with a 50 percent increase in the power limit. The extra power headroom increases performance since the R9 Nano no longer has to conform to its strict 175W TDP management and can perform more like the R9 Fury X. In terms of overclocking frequencies, the HBM memory remains locked, like on the R9 Fury and Fury X, but the core can be tweaked. We managed an extra 75MHz from our sample, a modest 7.5 percent increase, and combined with the increased power limit it resulted in a healthy performance gain."