AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100, 5100 And 4100 Series Workstation Graphics Review: Polaris Goes Pro [Updated]

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each graphics configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

AMD has been working to optimize its Polaris GPU-based offerings, through a variety of methods -- software, firmware, board design, etc. The team's effort put in to maximizing efficiency appears to have paid off, as the Radeon Pro WX 5100, despite offering higher performance than the Quadro M2000 (more often than not), also consumes less power under load. The Radeon RX 4100, uses even less power, which you'd expect considering its lower-end GPU. The higher-end WX 7100 consumes more power than the Quadro, but it also offers significantly better performance.

In terms of noise output, there's not much to report. The Radeon Pro WX series cards are virtually silent at idle. Their cooling fans spin, but make virtually no noise as they could not be heard over the PSU and CPU cooler in our test system. Under load, their fans do spin up, but again, the cards remain quiet. Even after hours of benchmarking and testing, the Radeon Pro WX 5100 and WX 4100 never generated much of an acoustic signature at all. The WX 7100 produced somewhat more noise under load, but it is still very quiet overall.