Sapphire FireGL V7600 - the Workstation Edge

Introduction

Introduction

Ever wondered what really separates the workstation class graphics cards from the usual consumer version? It certainly isn't the silicon underneath the cooler because for as long as we can remember, the workstation line of products has been derived from the same architecture used for consumer graphics. This is true for both ATI's FireGL and NVIDIA's Quadro line of workstation products and it's not hard to see why it makes sense for these companies to have a single unified design to save research and engineering costs. For the intrepid enthusiast who sees nothing incongruous with dabbling in digital content creation and enjoying a game of Quake on the same system, such a situation has given rise to softmod the consumer Radeon/GeForce cards into a FireGL card with the appropriate drivers and firmware. A Google search on 'softmod', 'Quadro' and 'FireGL' produced thousands of links on information regarding this issue, covering a diverse range of cards from the past to the present.

Of course, while the penny pinching amateurs may resort to these methods to get workstation equivalent performance for cheap, this is not exactly an option for professionals. For these users, stability and reliability are a must, along with the assurance that comes with a fully certified and tested workstation graphics card. After all, besides having specialized drivers that are optimized for certain workstation applications, these cards have all undergone certification from the various application vendors that guarantee their performance and stability. Together with enterprise class support, these are some of the reasons why workstation cards cost so much more for similar hardware.

While we have focused mainly on consumer graphics products, we certainly had our fair share of questions about these expensive workstation graphics cards. To answer some of them today, we have one of the current high-end incarnations of the FireGL series, the Sapphire FireGL V7600 in our labs. Based on the ATI R600 GPU, the V7600 is hence a 'close relative' of the Radeon HD 2900 XT. A glance at the specifications confirms this, from the unified shader architecture to DirectX 10 support and Shader Model 4.0. There are some differences of course with GDDR3 preferred in this FireGL model over GDDR4 on the Radeon HD 2900 XT and the clock speeds are also quite different. As such, the FireGL V7600 is more of a variant of the consumer edition Radeon HD 2900 XT, but the FireGL series has even more extreme editions under the V8000 series. Before we go in depth, here are the technical specifications for the latest FireGL series and the V7600 model that the article focuses upon: