Conclusion; Winners or Rejects? Maybe Both...
Conclusion; Winners or Rejects? Maybe Both...
This conclusion is going to be a bit of an interesting thing since the two cards here are similar in form only and, at least on paper, certainly aren’t meant to compete against one another. However they do end up going head to head since anyone who is tight on space in their high performance small form factor build will invariably look towards one or the other. The GTX 970 Mini is the more affordable solution while the Nano has an impressive spec sheet but is there one “right” answer here? No.
NVIDIA’s GTX 970 hasn’t exactly had an easy life thus far and with good reason. There’s no denying that revelations about its core’s
oddball memory configuration and subsequent drubbing on forums hurt its position within the market. But, as evidenced by its placement throughout the tests, there should be no denying the ASUS Mini version can and will deliver a superlative gaming experience for SFF users who don’t want to step up to the more expensive Nano. Even at 4K, its memory “limitations” once again proved to be a non-issue.
The R9 Nano on the other hand continues to impress me with its capabilities. How AMD was able to pack so much performance into such a svelte little card simply defies belief and it remains the pinnacle of great GPU engineering today. It does require a not-so-insignificant amount of cold hard cash and the inductor whine can be a turn-off but overall value is something I’ll get into a bit later.
For now let’s talk about raw performance since that’s what most of you have come here to see. In the chart above, the GTX 980 was added as a bridge between these two cards due to the fact that the Nano and GTX 970 straddle either side of NVIDIA’s fully enabled GM204 core.
Obviously the R9 Nano walks all over the Mini at both 1440P and 4K to the tune of 23% and 31% respectively. This should come as no surprise given their comparative positioning but it is nonetheless interesting to see how AMD’s new architecture can leverage a revolutionary memory design to lengthen its lead at 4K. The slightly overclocked GTX 970 puts up a heroic fight and delivers excellent framerates at the lower resolution but it just can’t keep up in most games.
Without delving further into any other aspect of these cards, it should be more than evident that ASUS GTX 970 Mini is a card for 1080P and 1440P gaming. That bodes extremely well for its capabilities in current generation titles and at more typical resolutions. Meanwhile, the R9 Nano has a good amount of future proofing built into its frame and is infinitely better suited for 4K gameplay.
On paper at least those rather impressive 23% and 31% wins just can’t do much to mitigate the Nano’s 86% higher price and as a result it gets absolutely demolished in the performance per dollar category. Flagship cards -or any extremely high-end product for that matter- are hardly ever considered a good value since you end up paying through the nose for a few percentage points of additional performance over more affordably priced solutions.
One of the main problems with niche cards is their specialized aspect always commands a premium. In this case the GTX 970 Mini does perform better than a stock GTX 970 but you’ll still pay a hefty charge for the convenience of an ITX-compatible GPU. The same goes for AMD’s R9 Nano; it costs just as much as a Fury X but offers substantially lower framerates.
Another thing that should be mentioned is my hesitation when it comes to putting up charts like this since they offer a poor view about the relative financial and performance metrics of a given product. For example, the GTX 970 just cannot deliver consistently playable framerates at 4K but, due to its much lower price, it still “looks” like a better value than the Nano. Trust me, AMD’s higher price brings with it a world of difference when moving up the resolution and in-game setting ladders.
In the performance per watt category things are drastically different with both cards running literally neck and neck at 1440P and the Nano understandably pulls away at UHD resolutions. Not only does this go to show that the GTX 970’s lower performance is a handicap in some situations but AMD also needs some serious recognition for how they constrained their card’s power consumption profile. It’s been a long time since I was able to say that a Radeon card won a perf per watt comparison.
With all of these results taken into account, is there one of these cards I would choose over the other? The answer to that is a firm no but that was already evident a few paragraphs earlier. While they actually complement each other quite well with the Nano covering the high end market and the GTX 970 Mini effectively taking care of a more affordable price point, neither is an overwhelmingly good solution.
There are a number of reasons for this; the first and foremost being current offerings in the ITX chassis market don’t require the use of extremely compact GPUs. Most case manufacturers have been able to engineer 10” to 12” of GPU clearance into their small form factor designs without sacrificing overall volume or footprints. There are a few ITX cases which do need something like the Nano or Mini but their lack of basic features and need for low-powered SFF PSUs make for an unappealing combination.
Ironically, I find both cards to be poorly suited to a living room environment as well. If you need them for 1080P content there won’t be any problems, but UHD is simply a bridge too far. NVIDIA’s lack of HDCP 2.2 support and AMD’s bewildering inclusion of an HDMI 1.3 output in lieu of the newer and more versatile HDMI 2.0 standard stymies things on both fronts.
While NVIDIA’s missing HDCP 2.2 certification isn’t going to negatively affect gaming and can be worked around by playing other forms of non-protected content, the Nano’s lack of HDMI 2.0 is particularly egregious. With its lone HDMI 1.3 output, even games will encounter video bandwidth limitations unless your UHD TV is one of the few that includes a DisplayPort input. The only way to actually create a 4K60 interface with a supporting TV is to find a DisplayPort 1.2 to HDMI 2.0 active adapter and those are even rarer than DisplayPort-compatible UHD TVs.
So where does this leave us with the GTX 970 Mini and R9 Nano? Both are poor choices from an overall value standpoint, especially when you consider the dearth of SFF cases that actually require a non-conformist GPU. However, if someone forced me to make a choice between the hugely expensive AMD solution and ASUS’ more affordable but less capable option, I’d probably end up picking the Nano….but just by a hair. While far from perfect, it offers awesome performance per watt (especially on a 4K PC monitor) and will future-proof your system for a longer period of time. The Mini on the other hand is able to somewhat narrow the performance gap with some pretty impressive overclocking feats but it tends to fall behind under exceedingly stressful workloads. In the end, the ultimate choice for you will likely rest with budget above all else.
