AMD FirePro V8700 1GB

In addition to sharing the same GPU core as the Radeon HD 4870, its design is similar to this $200 consumer-grade graphics card. As can be gathered from the picture below, the FirePro V8700 is much shorter than the FireGL V8600 and can even fit within a standard ATX chassis. The RV770XT core in the V8700 is built on a 55nm manufacturing process compared to 65nm with the R600 found in the FireGL V8600.

The cooler atop the V8700 occupies a second expansion slot and the Stereoscopic output is raised to the second slot. This cooler is made of copper and does employ heatpipes to assist in the cooling process. The heatsink's fan will dynamically adjust depending upon load and from our tests the fan ran fairly quiet.

The FirePro V8700 has two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors positioned along the back edge of the PCB.

The FirePro V8700 is CrossFire 2.0 compatible, but the Windows nor Linux drivers support these workstation ASICs at this time for aiding in the graphics performance. Introduced recently to the Linux drivers was MultiView support, which is compatible with multiple FirePro graphics processors. There are also the connectors on the FirePro V8700 for Genlock/Framelock devices.

The connectors on the expansion slots for this PCI Express 2.0 graphics card include one dual-link DVI, 3-pin Stereoscopic output, and two DisplayPort connectors. DisplayPort is not found on a standard Radeon HD 4870 graphics card and there are not many monitors sporting this HDMI-like connector, AMD is making this move with workstation customers in mind.