AMD FirePro V4900

Unigine Tropics at 1920 x 1080 was the final test where the Phoronix Test Suite did some system monitoring. The GPU temperature on the V4900 for this Unigine Engine test was 75°C, which was the same as the V5800 while the V5900 was 13°C cooler.

The system power consumption of the FirePro V4900 when running Unigine Tropics shot up to 245 Watts, which was the same as the V5900 and less than the V5800.

The MSRP on the AMD FirePro V4900 that will begin shipping today is $189 USD. The FirePro V4800 is currently selling for $160 USD, the V5800 for $360, and the V5900 for $430. Following the V4900 launch it would be surprising if the V5000 series don't see a reduction in price, seeing as the new Turks-based FirePro V4900 performance is generally competitive with the V5800 and in some cases the V5900, while it costs roughly $200 less.

In other words, the FirePro V4900 is a great bargain for a lower-end workstation graphics card. The FirePro V4900 can only handle triple displays with Eyefinity, but if you are after anything less than a mid-range graphics card, chances are you will only be after a single or dual head configuration. With the V4900 GPU being derived from the Northern Islands family, the driver support is already fairly mature and should work great. I did not encounter any issues during my few days of testing and this brand new graphics card is already working with the open-source Linux driver.

The GPU thermal performance and power consumption is also in line with its FirePro siblings. The FirePro V4900 appears to be a very nice lower-end workstation graphics card that is competitive and at great value. When I am back from the Ubuntu Developer Summit there will likely be some more FirePro Linux benchmarks, if anyone has any test requests to let me know via Twitter or email.

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