Friday, September 4th 2015
AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
There won't be a Radeon R9 Nano review on TechPowerUp. AMD says that it has too few review samples for the press. When AMD first held up the Radeon R9 Nano at its "Fiji" GPU unveil, to us it came across as the most promising product based on the chip, even more than the R9 Fury series, its dual-GPU variant, and the food-processor-shaped SFF gaming desktop thing. The prospect of "faster than R9 290X at 175W" is what excited us the most, as that would disrupt NVIDIA's GM204 based products. Unfortunately, the most exciting product by AMD also has the least amount of excitement by AMD itself.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
Are we sourgraping? You tell us. We're one of the few sites that give you noise testing by some really expensive and broad-ranged noise-testing equipment, and more importantly, card-only power-draw. Our reviews also grill graphics cards through 22 real-world tests across four resolutions, each, and offer price-performance graphs. When NVIDIA didn't send us a GeForce GTX TITAN-Z sample, we didn't care. We didn't make an announcement like this. At $2,999, it was just a terrible product and we never wished it was part of our graphs. Its competing R9 295X2 could be had under $700, and so it continues to top our performance charts.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
759 Comments on AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
I see no mounting/mounted storage anywhere.
작지만 맵다, 라데온 R9 나노 리뷰 : (2) #MakeItNano 프로젝트 - IYD - Everything Inside Your Device
Don't worry. There is also English text in that article.
Very powerful system. Not just the card. Dimensions are 166mm x 244mm x 188mm.
Still, this is a derail - the thread is about TPU not getting one to review, not for Nano PR.
www.techpowerup.com/215663/lack-of-async-compute-on-maxwell-makes-amd-gcn-better-prepared-for-directx-12.html
You are a lunatic.
As for the thread, I think until we start looking at reviews in 3 days from now, and probably many start laughing at some of them for being completely superficial, there isn't much to write that hasn't been written already.
A) You didn't get a review sample because you don't kiss the ground that company walks on.
B) The reviewer exists to inform the consumer. By their very nature, a bias when doing reviews makes them useless. It'd be like going to Nvidia.com and reading a 10/10 review for the 970. They completely gloss over the last .5 GB of VRAM severely crippling the performance, because its a PR piece and not a review.
A) But that company has the right to only give out samples to people they want to. If they choose to buy good reviews like that, it's their right.
B) Absolutely. It's also the right of the consumer to not buy their product. If the consumer can't get information about the item that isn't potentially BS PR, then they shouldn't give the company a dime of their money until they can demonstrate their information is accurate.
A) But companies don't lie. Reviewers slandering their products does more damage than anything companies say that might be...optimistic.
B) You don't seem to live in this reality, or your memory is so selective as to be useless. All companies lie about something. Whether it be the little white lie of "*maximum rated" or the more egregious lie of "performance of a better product in a smaller package" that doesn't meet those promises, they lie. Reviewers exist to test the claims, and show whether companies are honest. If the reviewers are dishonest, then the company can simply demonstrate they are being dishonest, which not only damages the reviewer, but makes the company look more honest than they would be otherwise. This system works because dishonest reviewers are easy to eject, while companies can defend anything they say with data. Companies only have risk when they lie, so how honest is the company you evangelize?
A) AMD is made up of saints <I'm cribbing from Sony here, but the point stands for those on the red team>
B) The saints who stripped value out of the company by spinning off Global Foundries? The saints who cherry picked figures to try and show how bulldozer wasn't a pile of turds? How about the saints who fired off the engineers that made their company run, so the budget could look good for one more quarter and they'd get their insane bonuses? AMD, Nvidia, and Intel aren't run by saints, their run by the almighty dollar. That's why AMD is doing what they're doing now. AMD is selling their new GPU on PR, and not performance. It's dishonest, it'll eventually be proven as such, and anyone with a modicum of reason can see it's getting sales today which will bankrupt the company in the future.
A) Nuh-uh.
B) End of discussion. You lack any reasoning, and continuing to argue the point would be a waste of air.
What i know is when AMD don't give you a Card for reviewing then the reviewer didn't thread amd good.
So whats your opinion now why Techpowerup don't get a Card from AMD? Are they realy so indipendend like they want to let you know?
Reviews are to provide factual information on a product before buying it and we all know what kind of bullshit AMD is been putting into their PR campaigns and TPU has been good at cutting through the bullshit from both camps.
All in all, are you Sony? You see to be just as intellectually deficient as Sony is...
Our mods are far too lenient. I'm all for free speech but not the type of incessant trolling that is allowed to go on here. I got kicked off of S|A a long time ago on my second post for calling a generic position a zealot. This level of 'discussion' is simply bad for the community. We need to implement the idiot gate.
Your boss say every day to you, you aren idiot, i don't pay you, you are fulish.
Do you go to work on the next day?
Nice logic you have!
The second possibility is you are genuinely an idiot. The act of explaining this to you is a fruitless effort, because you lack the ability to grasp this new concept. In this case, continuing to talk to you is fruitless for everyone.
I'm going to, against my better judgement, assume its language. Maybe this time, assuming nothing, you'll get it.
This is not a situation where AMD is favoring review sites.
This is not a situation where there are physically no available hardware devices, though the supply does seem to be very limited.
This is not a situation where reviews are being done to demonstrate the truth behind the claims of a company.
What we have here is AMD trying to control a message. They are trying to sell a product, prior to the factual claims being verified. They are doing so by sending cards to uninformed consumers, who will sell the card based upon a coolness factor rather than actual performance. This type of crap bites people in the butt. You sell your product on cool, and when performance is demonstrated to be poor you lose future sales.
If you'd like some examples, let's go to the movies for a moment.
1) Have you ever watched an Uwe Boll movie? Having watched one, would you see another? Knowing that they all suck, how do Uwe Boll movies always have critics giving them praise on the cover? Would you pay to see the next one?
2) Have you watched Battlefield Earth? That movie was once something that garnered positive reviews, from the church of scientology (intentional lower case there, they are a cult and don't deserve a proper noun).
3) Have you seen any Happy Madison movies (it's Adam Sandler's production studio) recently? Let's focus on only the most recent abomination, Pixels. That movie was panned by so many critics, and Rotten Tomatoes has it at 17%. Would you go see that movie, knowing that 83% of people didn't like it? It did have a great premise, even if cribbed directly from Futurama.
4) Let's pose another question, Sony continues to sell Fantastic Four movies to the population. They constantly are sold on CG, yet Fant4stic has a rotten tomatoes score of just 9%. Knowing that, would you spend money on that movie?
Allow me to put this simply. AMD is not snubbing TPU, AMD is cutting its own nose off, to spite its face. They may squeeze some sales out of the Nano before it is found to be lacking, but be real. The people who buy the Nano will be angry that they spent that much money, and got second rate performance. Next time they buy a GPU they'll overlook AMD entirely, because they are still angry with them. You get one card sale today, and loose that customer forever for it. AMD is waging a PR war, in which every "success" will cost them a bit more of their future. Thankfully, HBM1 is in limited supply. Maybe AMD can hobble along without 8 toes, but if they intend to do anything more than just survive this activity must be stopped.
Does anyone put the gut on anyone's head to buy a Nano the first day it comes out? Even if TPU does a review in a month from now, I am pretty sure that most people, at least those with half a brain functional and a little patience, will simply wait a month, before buying a $650 lottery ticket. Now, if someone thinks it is cool to be the first with a Nano card, the first to create an unboxing video, the first to post a thread with benchmarks and photos, well, great. That's how forums work anyway.
Nano is not going to sell by the thousands the first day it comes out. Not even the first week, or month. So, until AMD manages to have enough quantities of any Fiji card out there, there will be probably dozens of reviews on the internet, TPU's included.
The vast majority* of people actually spending $650 on a card will do their homework before purchase.
The issue is the way AMD is massaging the launch and message. You could argue that AMD has a long history of doing this ( remember theTrinity launch for example), but it doesn't make it any more palatable.
* The launch of the card isn't just about the card, it is about the message AMD want to get out - not just about their own product, but in comparison with the competition, and a massaged company profile. Limiting reviews to companies prepared to spout the company line brings into question the objectivity of those reviews. Most people don't do anything more than gloss over the facts, look at the pretty pictures, and come away with an impression shaped by the summary. If this wasn't the case, why are so many AMD fanboys up in arms about having Project CARS being part of a benchmark suite? and why AMD themselves are vociferous in their shoutcasting and guerrilla marketing against GameWorks ? You seem unhappy at Nvidia's Gameworks program for its lack of direct access, but seem OK with AMD restricting access to its own product. No one is holding a gun to the game developers heads, or the prospective buyers of the game for that matter.
Personally, I couldn't give a shit about Nano - I prefer my graphics not to have training wheels attached (power and OC locked down), but it is galling to see some of the sites that I enjoy visiting being denied access simply because they won't kowtow to a companies propaganda. At least when W1zz tore Nvidia a new one on the GTX 590 review, the company didn't pitch a hissy fit in retaliation.
AMD (Hardware Partner):
-Deus Ex
-Hitman
-AotS
-Tomb Raider 2016
-Battlefront
AMD (Known Affiliation):
-Mirror's Edge
-Fable: Legends
-AMD (assumed based on historical hardware partnerships):
Nvidia (Hardware Partner):
Ark
King of Wushu
Nvidia (Known Affiliation):
Unreal Tournament 4
Nvidia (assumed based on historical hardware partnerships):
Gears of War (Microsoft)
Neutral:
-Arma 3 (coming with map pack iirc)
-Dayz Standalone
-Killer Instinct (Microsoft)
-Halo Wars 2 (Microsoft)
-Star Citizen
www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3jyybm/quotthe_vast_majority_of_dx12_titles_in_20152016/cutgmrb
Guru3D has one, Im sure you all agree they are far from biased so the truth about whether this card is good or not will come out with their review.
Its pretty much just facts, numbers, very little opinion involved.
Perhaps some different testing rigs and settings but other then that it should all provide the same numbers.
A few more then 1 review is wanted to be sure but I dont really see it as such a crying shame that TPU is not getting this card.