AMD Slashes Price Of R9 Nano To $499

With an unexpected press release, AMD has slashed the price of one of its flagship Fiji based GPUs, the Radeon R9 Nano, from its launch price of $649, to a much more attractive $499. This out of the blue price cut comes just days after the end of CES, where AMD also announced the new Polaris architecture, available some time around April this year.

The Fiji based GPUs were AMD’s first HBM based GPUs (High Bandwidth Memory, with the RAM stacked on top of the GPU die) originally released as the R9 Fury and Fury X. The R9 Nano was released later on, and was meant to be a Fury X in miniature.

The Nano’s actual performance put it as a somewhat underclocked Fury in a very small, but energy efficient (as far as AMD cards go) package, suitable for Mini-ITX systems. It had its own niche, but the $649 price tag put it out of reach of a lot of system builders.

While the other Fiji cards have drifted in price over time, this marks the first time AMD itself has slashed the price of its flagship GPUs. Starting with such a niche GPU as its first cut is somewhat puzzling, as the other two Fury cards remain the same price – at least for now. This puts the Nano at the same price as the R9 Fury.

Whether we are to see more price cuts for the other flagship products remains to be seen, but with the upcoming launch this coming summer of both AMD Polaris-based cards, and NVIDIA’s own Pascal-based GPUs, the timing is not too surprising. Currently, retailers have yet to react, although Newegg currently has a Nano by SAPPHIRE for the listed $499.

If you fancy seeing something a little bit interesting, check out this video by Linus Tech Tips, as they take seven(!) AMD R9 Nanos, and play 7 different games on the same machine, at the same time. Multiseat virtualization at its finest…