ATI FireGL V8600 1GB Workstation Graphics Card

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, April 16, 2008, 01:30 PM EDT

As many of you know, ATI has been particularly aggressive with their FireGL workstation graphics card lineup over the past six months. While their flagship R600-architecture was the basis for the solid (but ultimately underwhelming) Radeon HD2900XT for the gaming market, our tests have shown that this particular GPU architecture is much more competitive in the workstation market. While the R600 may not be the best choice for a high-end gaming rig, it is indeed a powerful chip for high-end OpenGL work, and as such, has led to a revival of sorts for ATI’s FireGL lineup.

With an excellent performing workstation GPU in tow, ATI finally took the steps to get their latest generation of FireGL cards out to the market fast – much faster than we’ve seen from them in the past. ATI now has a number of R600-based workstation products out on the market, and is competing quite well with NVIDIA in terms of both price and performance. ATI’s cards generally offer nearly all the bang for the buck as the QuadroFX lineup, but ATI has some unique models as well which give them their own following of users. One of their newest models, the FireGL V8600 1GB, has finally hit the market. And this is the card we’ll be looking at today...

ATI FireGL V8600 1GB Workstation Graphics Card

Tags: ATI, workstation, graphics, firegl, Fire, Car, graphics card, Work, 860, card, Graphic, GB, tat, ICS, stat, AP, AR, K

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com