AMD ATI FirePro V8750 Workstation Graphics Card

It is difficult to tell the difference between the V8700 and the new V8750. Physically, they look identical except for the V8750 label found on the heatsink shroud. Both the V8700 and V8750 share many of the same PCB attributes as a Radeon HD 4870 card, although there are some slight differences.

The FirePro V8750 uses a shiny black heatsink assembly that houses ATI's dual-slot copper heatpipe cooling solution. The embedded fan exhausts air out of the back of the card and out of the system. During startup, the fan spins loudly for a few seconds but is very quiet during normal day to day use. We rarely even heard the fan after startup. Compared to previous high end FireGL cards, the quieter working environment is a welcomed improvement.

If you flip the card over and inspect the backside of the PCB, you can see that the FirePro V8750 has a modern CrossfireX compatible multi-GPU connector. However, AMD does not support multi-GPU operation on the FirePro lineup just yet in any other OS but XP, so these connectors are somewhat useless at this point in time for users of other operating systems. For the record, you can integrate multiple FireGL/Pro cards into the same system and have them run independently with any OS, but AMD does not support linking multiple cards together for enhanced workstation-application performance yet on anything but XP. On the other side of the PCB, around the Crossfire connectors, you can see the necessary connectors for connecting Genlock/Framelock daughter boards.

The FirePro V8750 sports two DisplayPort connectors, along with a single dual-link DVI output. Keep in mind, very few monitors actually support the DisplayPort interface. Also, you can not use all three ports simultaneously as the card only supports using two displays at a time. The card uses a PCI Express 2.0 x16 interface and requires two 6-pin PCIe power connections.