AMD FirePro V8800 2GB

Assuming you are not CPU bound, the FirePro V8800 graphics card is clearly a nice step-up from the previous generation workstation graphics cards. However, next up we also wanted to check in on some other graphics card vitals such as the thermal performance and load usage, which is possible to monitor during the testing process via the Phoronix Test Suite. The Phoronix Test Suite charted all of the system vitals while running all of the view-sets found within SPECViewPerf 10.0.

Not only is the FirePro V8800 one hell of a performer, but it also ran the coolest out of the selection of graphics cards that we tested: the Radeon HD 5770, FireGL V8600, FirePro V8700, and FirePro V8750. The room temperature was maintained during this entire process and the CPU temperate was also the same, but as you can see there is quite a difference in the temperature between the GPUs. The Phoronix Test Suite polls these temperatures directly through the exposed ATI OverDrive extension on Linux. The FirePro V8700/8750 graphics cards started the trend of running significantly warmer than the FireGL V8600 (by 10+°C warmer!), but fortunately this is not the case with the FirePro V8800. In fact, the FirePro V8800 was 7°C cooler on average than the FireGL V8600 and even 3°C cooler than the consumer Radeon HD 5770 product.

The Phoronix Test Suite also recorded the GPU fan speeds when SPECViewPerf 10.0 was running. On average, the GPU fan speed for the FirePro V8800 was running slightly higher than with the V8700/8750 cooling solution, but not by much, and at the same time lower than the Radeon HD 5700 / FireGL V8600. Even when enduring the load from SPECViewPerf 10.0, the GPU fan speed never rose above 27%. The fan was quiet during the entire testing process.

Too bad there are not more demanding OpenGL workstation benchmarks for Linux, as even with SPECViewPerf 10.0 the GPU was not fully utilized the entire time. The FirePro V8800 should have no problems putting up with a great deal of work.