AMD FirePro V8800 2GB
Last week AMD launched the FirePro V8800, which is their first workstation graphics card derived from an ATI Evergreen graphics processor and designed to be a step-up from the previously reviewed FirePro V8700 and FirePro V8750. The AMD FirePro V8800 features 2GB of GDDR5 video memory with 147.2 GB/s of bandwidth, 1600 Stream processors, four DisplayPort outputs, ATI Eyefinity support, DirectX 11.0 / OpenGL 4.0 support, OpenCL 1.0 capable, a full 30-bit display pipeline, Multi-View display support, and much. We have now carried out our Linux testing of this new ultra high-end workstation graphics card and have the results to share this morning.
The FirePro V8800 is just the first of the Evergreen-based workstation graphics cards that AMD will be launching over the coming months, but this is their new ultra high-end offering that was introduced last week (pardon that this review was not published on launch-day, due to touring Chernobyl). Besides doubling the number of Stream processors and bringing Eyefinity and OpenGL 4.0 to the workstation arena and other features derived from the Evergreen GPU, the clock speeds are also higher than with the previous generation FireGL/FirePro cards. The RV870 core is clocked at 825MHz while the 2GB GDDR5 memory is operating at 1150MHz. This is in comparison to the FirePro V8700 that operated at 750/850MHz or the V8750 that upped the memory clock to 900MHz. The now much older FireGL V8600 ran at 688/868MHz. The FirePro V8800 is also built off a 40nm manufacturing process where the older FirePro V8700/V8750 GPU was on a 55nm process. AMD submitted the FirePro V8800 to Phoronix as a test sample.
AMD's FirePro V8800 is noticeably larger than the V8700 series hardware, but it is not quite as big as the massive FireGL V8600 graphics card. There is a matte black shroud covering the heatsink of this graphics card. In fact, the heatsink runs the entire length of the graphics cards PCB. The fan on this GPU heatsink is about the same size as the V8700/8750 cards and we found it to operate at roughly the same noise level.