AMD FirePro V7900

It should be to no surprise considering AMD's level of Linux support in the past few years and how Linux is the big OS player in the workstation market, but the FirePro V7900 is fully supported by the already available proprietary Linux drivers. Running an fglrx 8.83 (Catalyst 11.3) driver or newer is all that is needed. Obviously, the support will continue to be refined in the coming months, but already when doing our initial benchmarks of the V7900 from the fglrx 8.84 / Catalyst 11.4 driver the experience was pleasurable.

This initial FirePro V7900 Linux benchmarking take place from an Intel Sandy Bridge system with a Core i5 2500K quad-core, Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard, 4GB of system memory, and 250GB Seagate SATA HDD. Ubuntu 11.04 x86_64 was the base operating system with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, Unity 3.8.10 desktop, X.Org Server 1.10.1 desktop, GCC 4.5.2, fglrx 8.84.60 display driver, and an EXT4 file-system.

In this review for comparison against the FirePro V7900 were the FirePro V5800, V5900, V7800, FireGL V8600, V8700, and V8800. The Linux-based benchmarking was facilitated by the Phoronix Test Suite.