Radeon HD7950 or FirePro V5900

[Paul P]

Hi. I'd appreciate some help chosing a graphics card. I'm building a new system that will include a Dell 30" monitor with a resolution of 2560 x 1600. This system will be used for editing HD movies to bluray discs probably using Pinnacle 16, some 2D and 3D engineering type drawing (no industrial drawing software) as well as some photo editing and running the interface of the Sonar X1 Production Suite daw (digital audio workstation) music production software. This system will not be used for gaming, though I'll probably throw in a copy of skyrim...

The cards I've been considering - I want to use a single card - are the MSI Radeon HD7950 (3GB video ram) and the AMD FirePro V5900 (2GB video ram). I realize that these cards are on either side of a gaming/workstation divide but given my intended use, which would be better ?

Thanks, Paul

 

[Posimosh]

Not to raise the dead (thread) too much, but I thought I'd pipe in here...
If you are using it for gaming, the 7950 is going to perform better. With that said, I actually own the v5900 (which is how I found your question), and I can say that while I don't get the blazing fast refresh rates you would see in an overclocked or otherwise stressed gaming card, I have yet to have my computer crash under load (or at all). Part of this may be down to the ecc memory I'm using, the Xeon processor, or the workstation motherboard that comes in a Macpro, but I can say with the stock nvidia card, it crashed all of the time in windows.
If you can swing it, if I were you, I'd get a decent workstation card, and then add a gaming card (with gaming drivers and a higher performance rating overall per $ spent.) you would then have the best of both worlds.
Plus you can use the secondary gpu for a variety of things while you aren't gaming...