 We have made a ton of videos featuring the R9 Nano from AMD. There was the review that kicked it off that showed a badass little card that produced a massive amount of performance for its size. Without this card, I wouldn't have been able to do my Fallout 4 bomb build, and it was the ideal GPU for Linus' 7 Gamers 1 CPU build. But we have received criticism here from people saying that the Nano only really works in ideal thermal situations, and that the 970 Mini from the other team is the real small form factor king due to that problem. Is there any weight to this argument? Let's see. Intel brings DDR4 to the mainstream with their new Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K processors. Check the link in the video description to learn more. First, let's introduce the competitors, starting with the AMD R9 Nano. It features a Fiji Core GPU with 4096 stream processors and 4GB of HBM or high bandwidth memory, running at 1 gigabit per freaking second on a memory buss width of 4096 bits. The whole thing has a GPU boost clock of 1000MHz and houses all of this within a 5 inch by 4 and 3 eighths inch body, which has done super well in raw performance benchmarks in the past. In the other corner, we have the ASUS 970 Mini running a total of 1664 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR5 memory, which is running at 7010MHz on a 256-bit memory interface. The whole thing has a GPU boost clock of 1228MHz and comfortably sits within a frame that is 7.7 inches by 4.8 inches, which has also done super well in benchmarks in the past, but more on the thermal and price to performance side of things. Looking back at the review of the Nano, we can see the differences clearly laid out in the benchmarking graphs. The Nano handily beats the 970 Mini in everything when looking at raw performance. When you break away from that and look at overall wattage or thermal output, the story changes, and the 970 beats the Nano quite easily as well. And then finally, they do end up tying, but in the performance per watt category. The cards also have quite the price delta, with in US funds, the Nano coming at $479, while the Mini sits at a much more digestible $299. And this shows in the dollars per frame benchmark, where the Nano was literally the most expensive per frame card we tested, and the Mini was literally the least expensive per frame card we tested. Quite the polarization. All of that being said, those benchmarks are a little bit dated, and so far, what we know is that if you want a faster and smaller card, you can grab the Nano and pay up about an extra $180. But if you can deal with the slightly bigger size, don't mind a bit of performance loss, and want to save some pennies on your power bill, you can not spend the extra and go for the Mini. Options are good, and these two cards serve the small form factor market quite well in their own ways, and nicely complement each other in a way that I personally think fosters healthy competition instead of blind fanboying, which is pretty cool. But today, we look at them again, for one more testing scenario. I had issues with the Nano's performance in my Fallout bomb, and it took a lot for me to mostly fix it. Most cases have adequate airflow for your GPU, but not all of them. The ones that have very restricted GPU airflow that we have apparently left at Linus' house for undisclosed reasons. So what we did to replace the cases that are apparently at Linus' house, is we grabbed the Node 202, a solid small form factor case from Fractal. If you want to see the review of that, check up here. And then in order to restrict the airflow more, because this can actually take a full-size graphics card, we grabbed a Fractal Moduvent from a Define R5 that we had lying around, and then just taped it to the side. We then tested Crysis III, Tomb Raider, and Battlefront, both with the cover on and with the cover off, with both cards. Upon initial investigation of the raw average numbers, the Nano does throttle when the obstruction is introduced, but not by enough, and it still kind of wins by a significant amount in every single scenario, but that definitely is not the whole story. The average FPS doesn't lie, but it's also not an accurate description of how it felt. The Mini didn't give a crap. It got a little warmer, but performed exactly the same in all three games, with or without the obstruction. The Nano throttled, and throttled pretty hard, making the games feel sluggish and weird due to inconsistent clock speeds, as the card was fluctuating clock speeds throughout the test as it throttled, and then no longer throttled, and etc. Okay, so that's not great for the Nano, but I don't necessarily think that this is actually a big deal. Before you scream at me, allow me to explain. We had to create this scenario. This is a bad airflow scenario. That being said, there are cases that will have highly restricted airflow for your GPU, but this just arms you with more information for the planning phase of your build. If you have an extremely airflow restricted scenario, either find a way to feed the Nano some more air, or just take a step down to the Mini, which can still handle it and be a pretty badass card regardless. TunnelBear is the easy-to-use VPN app for mobile and desktop. TunnelBear lets you tunnel into 16 different countries, allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as if you are in said different country. They have apps for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac, and they also have a Chrome extension. Their apps are easy to use, just pick the country that you want to go to, essentially. Turn TunnelBear on, and watch as your bear tunnels your internet connection to your new location. When you turn TunnelBear on, two things happen. Your connection becomes encrypted with AES-256-bit encryption, and your public IP address gets switched, so you can show up as if you are in said different country, as you probably understand at this point. With TunnelBear, you get 500 megabytes of data for free, so you can just try it out, no credit card required. And if you want to upgrade to unlimited data, you can save 10% off by going to tunnelbear.com slash LTT. Did this information influence your opinion on these cards? Let me know on Twitter at Luke underscore LAFR. If you like this video, thumbs up. If you dislike this video, thumbs down. If you thought this video was kind of like average, but you're like, these guys seem all right, I guess I could watch more of their videos, click the subscribe button. Don't forget to buy a cool t-shirt that isn't this one, because this is from Bastion. I wore it because like I'm going to PAX East soon, and I thought it kind of made sense. Don't worry about it. You can click the link in the video description down below. If you want to use our Amazon affiliate code to buy anything on Amazon, that would be awesome. Or you can go to the forum and become a contributor there. Check out this video, which is the original review of the Nano, because I don't know, it's a pretty sweet card.