Conclusions

This has been without doubt a remarkable first outing for the new FireGL Card from AMD.   It has shown an unprecedented uptake in the new technology that AMD have been vigorously working upon to get right from the very beginning.    Yes it’s taken some time to get the product out; but the results shown here today show that the wait has been certainly well worth it.  

In the beginning we stated; A New Dawn – It’s a New Day with a New Beginning: this has to be something which the competition has to look seriously upon as with price structures so aggressively set with an MSRP estimate range of (UK Pounds) £149 - £200 or $300 - $390 US Dollars or €205 - €285 Euros’ .   OEM’s and System Integrators will be falling over in the queues to get their hands on these cards.   For an entry level workstation card it most certainly deliveries the “Bang for the Buck”!

Animation Studio’s, CAD/DCC Users, Soho’s and even the budding 3D enthusiast now have the opportunity to build and upgrade systems at no great costs, and, taking into account the lack of power consumption the card draws < 50 Watts.   Silence now once more returns to the office, without degeneration in system performance and of course most importantly - increased productivity output.   With the Two Dual Link outputs for driving ultra high resolution 30” widescreen monitors.

We have to point out; whilst the drivers are in their very early stages of development, they really do show massive potential which we have not seen in such a long time.  

With support for both Direct X 10 and OpenGL 2.1 is what we expected for this new range of FireGL Cards will mean no reduction upon the CPU performance.   Optimisation for the major software professional applications maintains a high level of functionality and reliability for the software application.  

Over the years we have watching as the FireGL cards grown in maturity.   As each new release arrives, one has to sit back in awe in the performance uptake over their predecessors.   For an entry level card to utterly out perform a card in the mid range; which has a much higher bandwidth and memory controller interface truly is a remarkable piece of engineering.   This time, the FireGL Team has totally surpassed themselves and should be swollen with pride of such a remarkable product presented here. 

Penultimately we must take into account the new mainboards, memory and hard drives from all the supplying manufacturers.  These are important peripherals, but do play a tremendous amount within the whole system I/O which drives the cards forward in the magnificent performance seen here. 

Finally we are not often left here lost for words but somehow the FireGL Team has managed to achieve this.    It is with baited breath that we await the next card from the range and see just how much power and performance this will provide.

www.3dprofessor.org award for the AMD’s FireGL V3600
Entry Level Professional Workstation Card

Page 1 - Introduction Part I
Page 2 - Introduction Part II
Page 3 - System Configurations and Benchmarks Used
Page 4 - Cinebench 9.5 Benchmark
Page 5 - MSI P35 Neo SPECviewperf® 10.0 Results
Page 6 - MSI K9N Diamond SPECviewperf® 10.0 Results
Page 7 - Supermicro C2SBA+ SPECviewperf® 10.0 Results
Page 8 - Dell Precision 690 SPECviewperf® 10.0 Results
Page 9 - *UPDATE* Dell Precision 690 SPECviewperf® 10.0 Results with 3.0GHz Woodcrest Xeons
Page 10 - Conclusions