FirePro V3900 Vs. Radeon HD 6570
AMD's FirePro V3900 and Radeon HD 6570 have similar PCBs and the same Turks chip, which begs the age-old question: Can the consumer card be converted? Once upon a time, you could flash a gaming card's BIOS with a workstation board's firmware and the driver would be none the wiser. So, we decided to try the same thing here.
We obtained a consumer-grade card with similar technical specifications and a closely matching PCB layout from HIS. The only differences are a modified cooler and an added analog video connector. Other than PCB color, the cards look very similar up front.
The backs do too.
The FirePro V3900's memory is clocked 100 MHz faster. Just to be safe, then, we tested the Radeon's RAM overclocked to 900 MHz to make sure it'd take the higher frequency without stability issues. Most other on-board components are not only running at the same speeds, but are even the same make and model.
The V3900's PCB is manufactured by Oriental Printed Circuits Ltd. Some AMD retail partners merely relabel their cards. HIS' board, however, is manufactured by Sheng Hua Electronics (Hui Yang) Ltd.
BIOS Mod
After establishing that the two cards feature similar hardware, we flash the Radeon HD 6570 in DOS using a copy of the FirePro V3900's BIOS. Although the PC boots and Windows launches, AMD's Catalyst Pro Control Center doesn't recognize our counterfeit. Evidently, we'd need to do a bit more software hacking to get this to work.

Even though modding the drivers by patching a few bytes in the right spots (editing the SSID and Subsys entries) gets the card recognized, this breaks the overclocking tool and hardware-based video acceleration. It even causes a performance hit in DirectX 9 through DirectX 11. Although we do see an increase in OpenGL performance in a few applications, we don't consider the hack to be worth the problems it introduces.
Bottom Line
Gone are the days, it seems, of joining two on-board bridges, or simply re-flashing a firmware to turn a gamer-oriented board into a professional-level card. We were able to soft-mod our Radeon HD 6570, turning it into a FirePro V3900, though side-effects were introduced in the process. Rather than comparing our hobbled Radeon to the FirePro, we flashed the desktop card back to its original BIOS and allowed it to compete on its own merits, allowing us to contrast AMD's mainstream and professional driver packages instead. Since the cards are almost identical, aside from a 100 MHz difference on the memory, any significant performance gap is going to have to be attributable to software-based optimizations.
- Meet AMD's FirePro V3900
- Can We Turn A Radeon HD 6570 Into A FirePro V3900?
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: EnSight
- Benchmark Results: Catia
- Benchmark Results: LightWave
- Benchmark Results: Maya
- Benchmark Results: Pro/ENGINEER
- Benchmark Results: SolidWorks
- Benchmark Results: Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup
- Benchmark Results: Siemens NX
- Power Consumption And Noise
- FirePro V3900: Faster Than Quadro, Still Entry-Level




Just curious
CAD apps like AutoCAD had Optimized code to run better on Professional Video Cards because the Optimized code in the Drivers.. Unlike Gaming Video Cards which has Optimized codes for Games but not on this CAD apps..
Just for the heck of it, and also to answer the question:
- Which card is the better choice for my work station if I'd also like to run a game or two during the lunch break?
This travesty needs to stop.
I'd especially like to see some benchmarks on mid-range pro cards.
Also, same question as above, can I use a Profession CAD graphics card along side a gaming card and get CAD benefits on one monitor and gaming on the other.
Unless your motherboard supports PCI Express slot switch off via software you can't. Even if it would, you would need to restart. Plus knowing AMD driver compatibility and reliability I wouldn't even hope atm. If you are gaming a lot and doing a lot of 3D, question is, what is more important to you, games or 3D content creation? If you are just beginner and doing CAD for fun, you will get by with gaming GPU. Otherwise, you must be making money on your projects and you should afford mid-high GPU for CAD.
Holly cow, you weren't kidding when you said 'Entry Level', this is more like 'Impoverished Level.'
To me an entry level are sub-$400 cards; nVidia Quadro 2000 series and AMD FirePro v5800. Obviously, Pro GPU's are tailored for their use.
Key word is support. Try to reach support with your 7 series GPU and then try the same when you are professional CAD user with CAD dedicated FirePro.
Blender is a free tool. Hardly AMD would be spending money to optimise for freeware.
its not about optimization for a free tool.. the cost of the tool isn't relevant. it is probably the most used tool in the graphical modelling/rendering world. hence a benchmark would be nice. Like i said, not everyone is build 3d engineering schematics with CAD.
Blender may well be a free tool, but it is amazingly powerful and many large companies use it with their own UI and plugins for very large projects. It is used from everything from movies to video game design, and it would be very nice to see how it stacks up.
Still, if you are making any amount of money doing this kind of work I am pretty sure you would be spending a minimum of $250 on your card, and likely somewhere in the $500-1000 range because it is the bottleneck of your productivity and the main determining factor on how many projects a person can do in a year.
Lastly, I would love to see how this card scales on different hardware to see how much was the $100 GPU, vs how much was due to running a duel CPU setup