AMD presents small Vega 56 video card from PowerColor as RX Vega Nano

In its keynote at Computex, AMD showed the small RX Vega 56 video card from PowerColor under the name RX Vega Nano. It seems to be a proprietary design of the video card builder instead of a reference PCB from AMD.

In its Computex presentation, AMD pretended that PowerColor’s tiny video card is the RX Vega Nano shown earlier. AMD already showed that small video card in August 2017, but it never came out. Even now it does not seem that the GPU manufacturer has made a reference design itself, because there are no other manufacturers announcing a small Vega 56.

PowerColor shows its RX Vega 56 Nano Edition in a conference room at the Computex trade show. The design has both an eight-pin and a six-pin power plug, which makes it slightly less spacious than the Vega 56 reference design, which has two eight-pin plugs. The card is probably more economical due to a more conservative adjustment of the boost clock.

PowerColor does not mention what the maximum speed is in the specifications. The base clock is 1156MHz, which is about the same as the regular Vega 56 video card. However, consumption is largely determined by the extent to which the card clocks up under heavy load. In other respects, the small variant is equivalent to regular Vega 56 cards with 8GB hbm2.

Many adjustments compared to a larger Vega 56 design don’t seem to have been made, apart from the size of the pcb and the cooler. With the R9 Fury Nano, of which AMD itself made a reference design, more had changed. That version only had one eight-pin plug, while the regular R9 Fury had two and could consume a lot more.

According to the AMD presentation, the PowerColor RX Vega 56 Nano Edition is now on sale. It is not yet known whether and when the small Vega card will be released in the Benelux and at what price. It is also not yet clear whether other manufacturers will also make RX Vega Nano cards.