Summary & Conclusion
AMD's Radeon Pro WX 7100 offers a lot of performance for what it costs. The Ellesmere-powered board isn't perfect, though. Issues we exposed through our initial evaluation had to be ameliorated, and the fixes had impacts of their own.
Still, we have to commend the Radeon Pro team's willingness to address our feedback. We can't remember there being much of that in the past. Now we're seeing improvements implemented quickly and completely.
With that we come to the Radeon Pro WX 7100's positioning. Nvidia's Quadro M4000 sells for roughly $785, while this card from AMD is available at $630. The difference is $155, so you have to consider whether the M4000 is worth its premium.
Of course, that depends on what you're doing. The features of both cards could hardly be more different. The Radeon Pro, with its 5.7 TFLOPS (single-precision) and 0.365 TFLOPS (double-precision), offers a lot more theoretical compute performance than the Quadro's 2.5 TFLOPS (single-precision) and 0.08 TFLOPS (double-precision).
AMD also scores points with its price for those who run professional apps needing certified drivers and workstation hardware. Simply flip through the performance results we generated to see how AMD fares in the applications important to you.
Conclusion
AMD does almost everything right with its Radeon Pro WX 7100. After a much-needed firmware and driver update, the only downside left to mention is increased noise from the single-slot cooler's fan.
The WX 7100 is of course not cheap, but we have reason to believe it's better than the Radeon RX 480. The GPU clock is more honestly stated, to start, since it can be maintained under taxing workloads. And in light of a better functioning voltage supply and its efficiency, the Radeon Pro WX 7100 ends up where we would have liked the Radeon RX 480 to be. Hopefully AMD can tune its idle power consumption, though that might not be as big of a concern in a workstation.
And with that, we can recommend this card to those aware of its strengths and limitations. Obviously, if you need Quadro drivers or CUDA support, you're locked into the Nvidia ecosystem. If not, though, you'll be happy with the Radeon Pro WX 7100's generally better performance, and the extra money in your pocket. AMD even provides a 10-year warranty, comprising a three-year general warranty for everyone and an additional seven-year supplemental warranty for anyone who buys from a certified retailer and registers within 45 days.
In addition, AMD is publishing a quarterly enterprise driver with the new Radeon Pro software that promises more stability and flexibility. We have already experienced the team's efforts to obtain customer feedback. With that, they seem to be on the right track.
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