AMD FirePro W8000 And W9000 Review: GCN Goes Pro

By Igor Wallossek
published

AMD’s GCN architecture, known for its strong compute and 3D performance, is finally being made available in the company's FirePro workstation graphics card family. Can AMD catch Nvidia? We test the two fastest FirePro cards to answer that question.

Power Consumption And Temperatures

Power Consumption

We benchmarked AMD’s FirePro W8000 and W9000 in three different power consumption scenarios: a GPGPU application with a 99-100% load (and quite a bit of help from PowerTune), rendering and video file output with a 75-80% load, and AutoCAD with a normal operating load.

It’s interesting to see the FirePro W8000 operating so much more efficiently than the larger W9000, a phenomenon that we also observed with the Radeon HD 7950 and 7970. AMD's W8000 consumes 184 W under full load, while the W9000 uses more than 275 W. The W8000 card looks particularly impressive, and it’s already overclocked compared to the Radeon HD 7950.

Temperatures

We added Nvidia's Quadro 6000 to our temperature comparison to give the acoustic benchmarks on the next page a bit more context. Both AMD and Nvidia use fan profiles that are optimized for minimizing noise under medium load scenarios. The Quadro 6000’s fan profile is even more extreme than AMD’s, which you can see in the graph as the cooler kicks in more aggressively to take the temperature back to under 90 degrees Celsius.

Igor Wallossek
68 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mayankleoboy1
    Typical of AMD : releasing cards without proper drivers.
    I bet most professionals wont touch these cards until atleast 3-4 driver revisions. These cards are newer, and perform worse than competitions older.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    1.How does the CPU performance affect the benchmarks ? IOW, are these softwares enough offloaded on to the GPU, that changing the CPU to a much better Intel Xeons wont affect the performance much ?

    2. Also, how do the consumer cards perform on these pro softwares ?
    Reply
  • rdc85
    They are new architecture, it's kinda expected result. I can see there a room for improvement, but without the application that can take advantage of it, then it will useless..

    in the end I'm glad to see that AMD graphic section is trying to make an effort, not like the their proc section..
    Reply
  • My impression is that on average, Nvidia higher quality. IMHO of course
    Reply
  • bystander
    mayankleoboy1Typical of AMD : releasing cards without proper drivers.I bet most professionals wont touch these cards until atleast 3-4 driver revisions. These cards are newer, and perform worse than competitions older.Did you not read all the benchmarks? In many of the benchmarks it beat out Nvidia's offering by a lot, some were even, some were worse. And they are cheaper than the those Nvidia cards it would seem by the price offering of 4.2k for the Quadro 6000 right on the last page, compared to 4k for the W9000 and 1.6k for the W8000.

    So depending on what you use it for, it may very well be a great choice.
    Reply
  • Please note that dozens of software companies (all the most prevalent in DCC and CAD) have thoroughly tested and certified the drivers for the W8000 and W9000 cards. This means that users of these applications should not be concerned about driver stability or user experience.

    Yes, this is a brand new architecture and yes, performance improvements will continue to be made with subsequent driver optimizations.
    Reply
  • ohim
    Even though no one will prolly ever play games on a workstation, this are the first cards to have equal or superior gaming performance over the consumer cards also. Wonder if taking a HD 7970 and possibly mooding the bios for a FirePro one how will it impact the workstation benchmarks.
    Reply
  • rmpumper
    The review needs at least one gaming GPU as comparison.
    Reply
  • I always wondered how well these cards would do with games, anyone an idea? :)
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    ohimEven though no one will prolly ever play games on a workstation, this are the first cards to have equal or superior gaming performance over the consumer cards also. Wonder if taking a HD 7970 and possibly mooding the bios for a FirePro one how will it impact the workstation benchmarks.
    AFAIK, its not possible now to BIOS mod a regular 7970 into a W9000. AMD and Nvidia have become smarter.
    Reply