AMD FirePro V7900 and V5900 Professional Graphics

Name: AMD FirePro V7900 and V5900 Professional Graphics
Brand: AMD

by Mathew Miranda — Tuesday, May 24, 2011, 12:00 AM EDT

Introduction

Page 1: Introduction

It has been a while since we last evaluated a workstation-class graphics card from the FirePro product line. The V9800 launched in September 2010 and was officially the last card to sport the ATI logo. Since then, AMD has released its Cayman-based Radeon HD 6900 cards for the consumer market, among many other Radeon HD 6000 series cards. It was only a matter of time before the new architecture made its way into the professional FirePro line.

Today we'll be looking at a couple of new AMD FirePro models, specifically, the V7900 and V5900. A quick glace below outlines some of the important specifications of each model. With the AMD FirePro V7900, professional users are treated to 1280 stream processors, 2GB of GDDR5 memory, and 160 GB/s of peak memory bandwidth. Furthermore, the AMD FirePro V5900 provides 512 stream processors, a 2GB frame buffer, and memory bandwidth in the 64 GB/s range. Both cards come with single-slot cooling solutions and multiple I/O ports for some multiple monitor action.

AMD FirePro V7900 and V5900 Professional Graphics Cards

Specs

	AMD FirePro V7900	AMD FirePro V5900
Core Clock	725 MHz	600 MHz
Memory Clock	1250 MHz	500 MHz
Stream Processors	1280	512
Total Memory	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5
Memory Interface	256 bit	256 bit
Memory Bandwidth	160 GB/s	64 GB/s
Output Connectors	4 x DisplayPort	2 x DisplayPort, 1 x Dual-link DVI
Form Factor	Single Slot	Single Slot
Power	150W	75W
Price	$999	$599

On the surface, the new FirePro models don't look like they bring anything revolutionary to AMD's product line. You get two additional DisplayPorts on the V7900 and an extra 1GB GDDR5 memory with the V5900 versus their closest counterparts in the line-up, but is that all there is to the story? Of course, our benchmark test suite will definitely show the performance benefits of these cards. Before we check out the results though, let's take a closer look at the cards to see how they differ from their predecessors.