AMD FireGL V8600 On Linux

System Setup:

We had installed the ATI FireGL V8600 inside the SilverStone Kublai KL03 chassis, which is EATX compatible but still was a tight fit and required moving the hard drive into a different bay. The test system we had used was based around a Tyan Thunder n3600M motherboard, and this graphics card was not almost compatible with the system due to the position of the first CPU socket and the heatsink running up against the graphics card cooler's mounting plate.

The rest of the system was made up of dual AMD quad-core Opteron 2356 processors, 4GB of DDR2-667 memory, Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive with 16MB of cache, dual Dynatron F558 heatsinks, and Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000W power supply. The software side of the system was made up of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron" (32-bit) with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and a pre-release of X Server 1.4.1. The system was connected to an Acer LCD monitor running at a resolution of 1680 x 1050.

AMD's FireGL and Radeon product support is unified with their fglrx Linux driver, which is part of the Catalyst for Linux package. Therefore, all Catalyst Linux releases are compatible with the FireGL products, but on a (near) quarterly basis, AMD does certify one of the Catalyst releases for use in workstation environments. These workstation releases contain additional testing and go through extra quality assurance tests in workstation applications by AMD's Linux team. At the time of writing, the most recent Linux driver listed for FireGL products is Catalyst 7.12 from this past December -- AMD seems to be overdue for an update. For the FireGL V8600 testing in this review, however, we are using the fglrx 8.47.3 / OpenGL 2.1.7412 from the Catalyst 8.3 package.