AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 Review: Powerful, Affordable Workstation Graphics

Name: AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, October 15, 2018, 09:00 AM EDT

Futuremark’s VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.

VRMark Blue Room

Testing VR Readiness

The Radeon Pro WX 8200 drops in right between the Quadro P5000 and P4000 here, and lands squarely in the VR-Ready category. A score of 719 is the minimum spec according to Oculus, here. The Radeon Pro WX 8200 beats that by over 2.5x.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

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.

Idle power is in the same ballpark for all of the test setups represented here, but load power is quite different. AMD's Vega-based GPUs are significantly more power-hungry than NVIDIA's -- no ifs, and, or buts about it. Load power (which was recorded while the GPUs were under load in LuxMark) was over 90 watts higher on the Radeon Pro WX 8200 versus the Quadro P5000.

Thankfully, the relatively high power consumption doesn't translate into a particularly noisy graphics card. While at the desktop or under light load, the Radeon Pro WX 8200 remains relatively quiet and likely won't be audible over a typical CPU cooler or PSU. When under a sustained, heavy load, the Radeon Pro WX 8200's fan does spin up significantly, however, and it's clearly audible outside a chassis, though it is not very loud.

Tags: AMD, graphics, GPU, (nasdaq:amd), radeon pro, wx 8200

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