AMD ATI FirePro V8800 Workstation Graphics Card

Name: AMD ATI FirePro V8800 Workstation Graphics Card - Page 3
Brand: AMD

by Mathew Miranda — Wednesday, April 07, 2010, 12:01 AM EDT

Testbed and Cinebench R11.5

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: In order to provide comparable results, each graphics card was installed on the same, high end X58 based test system. The components we used consisted of an EVGA Classified motherboard, Core i7 980X Extreme Edition processor, and 12GB of Crucial Ballistix Tracer memory. Within the BIOS, we configured the processor and memory to their rated specifications of 3.33GHz and 1600MHz respectively. The Crucial M225 solid state drive has a clean copy of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit installed. Once the installation was completed, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest drivers and applications relevant to the review article.

HotHardware's Test System

Core i7 Powered

Hardware Used:
Core i7 980X (3.33GHz)

EVGA Classified 760 Motherboard
(X58 Express Chipset)

ATI FirePro V8800 2GB
ATI FirePro V8750 2GB
ATI Radeon HD 5970

12GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3-1600
(6 X 2GB) 8-8-8-24 1T

Crucial M225 128GB SSD

Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Professional 64bit
ATI Catalyst Display Driver 8.702 - Workstation
ATI Catalyst Display Driver 10.3

Benchmarks Used:
Cinebench R11.5 64bit
SPEC Viewperf R10
3DMark Vantage 64bit
Unigine Heaven 2.0

If you're wondering why there aren't any NVIDIA workstation cards used in this article, here's the scoop. Since our last workstation card article, we've updated the test system to reflect the most current platform available to graphics professionals, specifically the new Core i7 980X processor and Windows 7 64bit operating system. Unfortunately, we no longer have the NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards to test, but invite you to reference the FirePro V8750 review to see how they compare with the results from this article. Also note that since NVIDIA has not yet released a Quadro update based on Fermi, comparing the V8800 to the V8750 is perfectly relevant at this time.

Cinebench R11.5 64bit

Synthetic OpenGL Rendering Performance

Cinebench R11.5 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. The benchmark goes through a series of tests that measures the performance of the graphics card under real world circumstances. Within Cinebench, graphics card testing makes use of a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase which measures the performance in OpenGL mode. Results are given in frames per second; the higher the number, the faster the graphics card.

The V8800 shows a slight improvement over the V8750, but not by much. It looks like the HD 5970's raw graphics processing power wins this round though. Just keep in mind that this is a basic OpenGL benchmark; the next few tests focus on specific applications that the V8800 is designed to handle.