AMD FireGL V8600 On Linux

The FireGL V8600 is very power hungry and can consume in excess of 220 Watts under a full load. In addition to needing a large EATX chassis for this graphics card, you will also need a high-end power supply (power supply reviews). As a PCI Express x16 slot isn't capable of providing enough power to this graphics card, two external power connections are required. Like the Radeon HD 2900XT, there are a 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-E connectors. For the 8-pin connector, if your power supply doesn't provide an 8-pin PCI-E interface, this connector is backwards compatible with a 6-pin source. A 700W or greater power supply is recommended for the V8600 1GB. The FireGL V8600 uses 80nm fabrication, but we expect the 2008 workstation refresh will all be based upon a 55nm process, which should improve the power efficiency.

This board is not PCI Express 2.0 compliant, but that should also change with the 2008 refresh. At the rear of the graphics card is a plastic handle / holding bracket to provide additional mounting support in compatible cases.

The FireGL V8600 does have two CrossFire connectors at the top of the graphics card, but CrossFire is currently not supported under Linux at all and on the Windows side there isn't even FireGL CrossFire support, yet. Though catering to high-end customers, the V8600 is Genlock/Framelock compatible. Genlock allows graphics outputs to be synchronized with an external source and Framelock is used to synchronize display channels from multiple systems.