Today AMD is announcing their new ultra-high-end professional workstation graphics card, the FirePro V9800—and it packs a powerful set of features that makes it unique in the workstation market. The V9800 resembles AMD’s current top-end card, the FirePro V8800, but doubles the on-board memory to 4GB of GDDR5 as well as adding two more monitor outputs, for an astounding total of six displays off of a single GPU.
The big push with the V9800 seems to be in workflow rather then sheer horsepower; running multiple monitors increases productivity and efficiency, so having six displays should be a significant boost to workflow thanks to AMD’s Eyefinity technology. The real question here is whether six displays crosses a threshold of returns for different people and tasks. It’s easy to see how six displays would be very helpful in the financial, simulation or oil and gas industries for displaying a lot of data at one time, and as a 3D artist, six displays sounds like a dream to me.
The V9800 certainly isn’t a wimp in terms of horsepower either, however, with 1600 stream processors. While it may not have the most onboard memory on the market it does have the fastest memory bandwidth; surpassing even the Quadro 6000.
Here are the full specifications that have been released so far:
- 1600 stream processors
- 2.72 Tflops (single precision)
- 4GB of GDDR5 memory
- 6 DisplayPorts with 5DP-sDVI & 1DP-dDVI adapters included.
- A two-slot FH/FL form factor.
- Power consumption of 199W.
- $3499 MSRP
While the V9800 is priced at a premium it still offers a strong price vs performance, it has impressively small power requirements and brings along some really interesting features if you want to scale your number of displays.
Icrontic will have a full review with benchmarks up next week.
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