If I was building a very small gaming/HTPC setup I still think I'd rather have a mini Nvidia 970, with a small overclock to close the gap, and have Nvidia's superior driver support and feature set TBH. Not to mention it will still be over £100 cheaper with the new price cut. It is a glimpse of the future though, as I'm sure most cards will be this size once the move to HBM is complete on both sides.
There are compelling reasons why I'm eyeing up a fury.. I like the look of the 34inch ultra-wides (3440x1440). Acer x34 (G-Sync) is about £150 more than Acer xr341ck (Freesync). I expect a good monitor to last several graphics cards and resent nvidia trying to lock me in with their proprietary tech AND have the cheek to charge extra for it!
That would be either foolish or the actions of a fanboi or both. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015...form_factor_video_card_review/15#.VpTlsLaLTGg
IMO this is the price the card should have released at. As a Nano owner, the thing's awesome, but I couldn't recommend it to people as the price was just too steep. Not sure why people keep bringing up the the small 970s though? Sure they're cheaper, but they're also slower by a decent margin. They're not really competitors as such, just products at different ends of the market.
It's a fair price. It's not really competing with the 970 - the question is more what are you trying to build. If you want a box for plugging into your tv is it really going to be so game heavy you need a high end graphics card in (even 970)? If you want some sort of lan gaming box does it really have to be so small you have to limit yourself to a short card being as there's plenty of SFF cases that fit a full sized gpu. You've got to be a particular person who wants a very small pc box, with very high end graphics, has lots of money and doesn't care about HDMI 2. If that's you then it's great.
This is good news. I think I will eagerly watch the price over the next few months for my Gaming Console scratch build. You can't deny the Nano is in a different league to the Mini Geforce 970, it's just how much you are willing to pay. Over £500 is way too high.
Wow, I totally dodged the bullet there. I was going to buy a Nano to Crossfire X with my Fury X literally about ten days before they changed the price. Ended up getting another Fury X for £395 so even at this new (and very good IMO) revised price I still did OK. Totally agree that this is the price it should have released at too. I'd probably have had one ages ago had they not been silly and used the same monkey that prices Nvidia's products.
I must say that the wonderful NVidia drivers led me to go from an NVidia GTX560ti to a Radeon R9 280X. NVidia took me on a journey where each successive driver was worse in stability than the one before and I ended up reverting to a six month old one to get stability. Haven't had a problem yet (over 2 years) with AMD (though I did hold off with the new drivers/control system 'till last week). I have to say though that GPU prices are now in silly territory. Maybe the new die shrunk AMDs might give NVidia enough to worry about that they start trimming their prices - if AMD stay afloat.
The foolish part is cutting prices before you have to. Let's face it, AMD needs cash and a few months more of full-price sales would have been handy (assuming, of course, it's selling - but if it isn't, then that's the reason for the discount and it has nothing to do with Polaris.)
It wasn't selling. There was an initial little spurt but after about a month sales just died. When the Nano launched I was pretty much certain that I would not be able to fit a second Fury X into my rig as the radiators hit each other and I had no way to mount the intake fan. So I was pretty much going to get a Nano. It was only after a while that I thought about it and realised that I would mod the PC I have (something I had sworn I would stop doing). But I followed the stock on OCUK and they really didn't have that many cards but they just weren't selling. I think AMD made another mistake with the Nano figuring that the ITX power user market was enormous. Kinda like how they made the Fury X for 4k without actually thinking about how many people were on 4k. AMD always tend to make things for the future rather than today. Their FX series CPUs for example did not work properly in Windows 7 and it was only when 8 launched that they actually functioned as they were supposed to. They need to stop doing that and stop with the kitchen sink and learn a lesson from Nvidia. Just start with the low end card, then move onto the mid range and then release the high end. That way they can cut features and increase clocks.
Then that's why the discount has been applied, not the impending Polaris launches. Which makes sense, of course: if AMD really cared about clearing the channel this early it would have announced a 23 per cent discount on the entire Radeon range, not just one card. (That also explains why AMD didn't say why it was discounting the card: "'cos no bugger's buying it" ain't a great soundbite.)
Yeah OCUK actually slashed the prices themselves a couple of times. They had them down to £429 when Scan were still selling them for £500+. I think like many have said all over the world now there was nothing wrong with the Fury range apart from the prices. On the way up to the 980ti AMD are dominating everywhere. The 390 has been much cheaper than the 970 and is much better technically (and in performance though not by much, yet) and their other budget cards also offer far more performance for the money. All apart from Fury. The Fury itself (non X) has not been shifting because whilst it's faster than the 980 it's also more expensive (and the 980 is over priced now) so that really needed to be the same price as the 980 in order for AMD to win there. The Fury X is the same price as the 980ti and loses to the 980ti in everything apart from 4k where it's pretty much dead even. So the Fury X needs to be at least £50 cheaper to lure in buyers. The Nano? hmm. That's a tough one. Performance wise it sits between the 980 and the Fury but price certainly was not. It's tough because as they say on auction shows "Where are you going to buy another one?" IE - where are you going to get a card that can actually play at 4k yet would fit in your pocket. And I think AMD assumed that the market for this type of product would be huge, so they could charge a huge price for it. Any way I am glad that prices are coming down now. There's one thing even an AMD troll can not argue over and that's price. You can bring up the £15 more per year power argument, bang on about how cool a card runs but if it's cheap and faster the trolls go very quiet...
