AMD Radeon Pro W6400 Review: Low Power RDNA 2 For Budget Workstations
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the professional graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
Please note, in the absence of a lower-end competitive NVIDIA card like the T600 or T1000, we tested the most mainstream Quadro we had available, a Quadro RTX 4000, for an additional reference point. The Quadro RTX 4000 is a higher-end, much more expensive card than the Radeon Pro W6400.
Out Test System Configuration:
| Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (3.4GHz - 4.9GHz, 16-Core) MSI X570 Godlike (AMD X570 Chipset) 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio Integrated Network NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 AMD Radeon Pro W5500 AMD Radeon Pro W6600 AMD Radeon Pro W6400 |
Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro AMD Radeon Pro v22.Q1 NVIDIA Quadro Drivers v511.09 Benchmarks Used: SPECviewperf 2020 LuxMark v4 Blender v2.93.1 SiSoft SANDRA 2021 VRMark Blackmagic RAW Speed Test IndigoBench 3DMark DXR Feature Test |
SiSoft SANDRA 20201 GPU Benchmarks
SANDRA's GPGPU Image Processing benchmark runs through an array of filters on its reference data and offers up an aggregate score, derived from a multitude of individual results. Its GPGPU Cryptography benchmark churns through an assortment of workloads, and presents individual results for overall bandwidth, AES256 encryption and decryption, and SHA2-256 hashing bandwidth. CUDA and OpenCL code paths are available in these tests, but we used OpenCL on all cards. Previously, using the CUDA path with NVIDIA GPUs resulted in better performance, but OpenCL actually outperforms CUDA in the latest versions of this test.
The new Radeon Pro W6400 more than doubles the performance of the older Radeon Pro WX 5100 here and nearly catches the Quadro RTX 4000 and previous-gen Radeon Pro W5500. The higher-end Radeon Pro W6600, however, offers a significant step up in performance.
LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks
IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks
The Radeon Pro W6400 continues to outrun the previous-gen Radeon Pro WX 5100, and its newer architecture with Infinity Cache actually give it the edge over the Radeon Pro W5500 as well.
Blender v2.93.1 Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a GPU-focused BMW and the "fishy cat" models for these tests...
