AMD's Hawaii based FirePro W9100

[NTMBK]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7927/amd-launches-firepro-w9100

Looks pretty interesting. With the Mac Pro shifting to Radeon I expect that lots of professional apps will have better OpenCL support than they used to, which will help a lot.

 

[Silverforce11]

Disgraceful that they would sell a $3999 GPU with such a CRAP reference cooling design. Horrible move AMD, you guys haven't learnt a single thing.

They cannot seriously expect professional work places to have this terrible noisy blower, its going to be a major task working on such a rig. I couldn't do it and had to do something about the noise of my own rig with reference R290s.

Really the person in charge at AMD of putting such a bad cooler go on a top of the line HPC GPU should be fired.

 

[TreVader]

Disgraceful that they would sell a $3999 GPU with such a CRAP reference cooling design. Horrible move AMD, you guys haven't learnt a single thing.

They cannot seriously expect professional work places to have this terrible noisy blower, its going to be a major task working on such a rig. I couldn't do it and had to do something about the noise of my own rig with reference R290s.

Really the person in charge at AMD of putting such a bad cooler go on a top of the line HPC GPU should be fired.

You do realize that the cooler on this is totally different than the cooler on the 290/X. This is a mostly passive cooler built for giant render farms.




At leas thats what all the diagrams i've seen say. The cooler looked nothing like the 290/X cooler.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Heres one review.

http://www.tomshardware.de/amd-firepro-w9100-review-benchmarks,testberichte-241531-2.html

I still dont understand why they don't improve the stock blower especially for a workstation card of this caliber (and cost).

 

[Silverforce11]

You do realize that the cooler on this is totally different than the cooler on the 290/X. This is a mostly passive cooler built for giant render farms.

At leas thats what all the diagrams i've seen say. The cooler looked nothing like the 290/X cooler.

You're wrong. Its the same lame cooler.

AMD blew it again, horribly so. Nobody is going to put multiple workstations with this thing in it in a working environment and expect any productivity. Imagine sitting in a studio trying to be creative and talk among your peers with several of these blowers on jetmode while working. AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN. Your engineers and artists will SEPPUKU after a few days of yelling at each other to converse.

Hawaii is an awesome chip, 1/2 DP throughput is amazing given its stellar rendering performance. It's just neutered by a terribly inadequate cooler. For a $3999 its actually disgusting they would do this.

 

[Enigmoid]

Noise is disgusting. At least its less than the W9000.

 

[SlowSpyder]

In my experiences, when my company buys these things we look at what our preferred vendors have that will do the job, and the costs involved. We never consider 8-9dB in a benchmark when buying workstation parts, if I brought that up at a meeting I'd be laughed at.

 

[Silverforce11]

Try putting a few of these in your next meeting doing intensive rendering or OpenCL and see if it doesn't matter. Because your meeting won't even function with a bunch of them going full blast.

 

[NTMBK]

What would be louder, 2 W9100s or 4 K6000s? Because in some workloads that's what the choice is:

Workload dependent, of course. But if you have a workload that is a good fit for this card then 8db isn't going to stop you buying it.

 

[el etro]

Cooler is bad. Power consumption is better than expected.

 

[n0x1ous]

But if you have a workload that is a good fit for this card then 8db isn't going to stop you buying it.

That may be.....the question for me remains. why not make this better on a $4000 part? Certainly they know its an issue after the 290 launch......makes no sense.....

 

[Ravshan]

What would be louder, 2 W9100s or 4 K6000s? Because in some workloads that's what the choice is:

Workload dependent, of course. But if you have a workload that is a good fit for this card then 8db isn't going to stop you buying it.

Oh, synthetic benchmarks. We meet again.

 

[Vesku]

It's not trying to hit 1Ghz with that cooler so I don't think it will be too big of a deal for the target markets. Those that need a workstation at their desk and are worried about noise will probably request those trash can shaped Mac Pros, anyway.

 

[NTMBK]

Oh, synthetic benchmarks. We meet again.

As I acknowledged, workload dependent.

 

[PPB]

More noise or more cash as I'm able to finish my workloads faster and thus improve my productivity?


Such a tough choice!

 

[Hitman928]

While the cooler appears to be sufficient and even works better than the w9000 version, I agree that it seems a pity that AMD doesn't come up with a really good cooler design for such expensive cards. I know they are probably trying to not spend any extra r&d costs right now, it would just seem to make sense to me that their flagship product would have a flagship cooler. Hopefully the dual core hybrid cooler is a sign of AMD starting to become serious about cooling their cards. Let's hope at least.

 

[Ventanni]

Just out of curiosity, aren't workstation cards also built with higher quality materials?

 

[Enigmoid]

As I acknowledged, workload dependent.

Yep. OpenCL the W9100 dominates but in nearly any productivity application (3dsmax, Simens, maya, etc.) the K6000 comes out ahead, except in maya.

 

[NTMBK]

Yep. OpenCL the W9100 dominates but in nearly any productivity application (3dsmax, Simens, maya, etc.) the K6000 comes out ahead, except in maya.

Until your dataset exceeds 12GB. But yes, NVidia have some pretty excellent OpenGL drivers, their performance is top notch on Quadro.

 

[TreVader]

Looking at the synthetic vs real world benchmarks it appears AMD needs to improve their drivers more than anything else. If this card was working as fast as it does in OpenCL in everything else it wouldn't matter that it's 5DB too loud

 

[AtenRa]

The majority of those cards will go to Rendering/Cloud/HPC Servers, noise is not the first thing they care about.

 

[Cookie Monster]

The majority of those cards will go to Rendering/Cloud/HPC Servers, noise is not the first thing they care about.

Actually its the Tesla/Firestream cards that normally end up in those servers.

Id never heard of a server that uses say a Quadro/Firepro based cards since most of them end up in desktop workstation PCs for say a mechanical engineer working in solidworks on a project that involves 500+ parts.

And I always wonder how important those OpenCL benchmarks are especially when nVIDIA doesn't quite care about OpenCL because of CUDA.

 

[Vesku]

Actually its the Tesla/Firestream cards that normally end up in those servers.

Id never heard of a server that uses say a Quadro/Firepro based cards since most of them end up in desktop workstation PCs for say a mechanical engineer working in solidworks on a project that involves 500+ parts.

And I always wonder how important those OpenCL benchmarks are especially when nVIDIA doesn't quite care about OpenCL because of CUDA.

Firestream is dead, it's all FirePro now:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6137/the-amd-firepro-w9000-w8000-review-part-1/7

See this post:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=36206655&highlight=#post36206655

Here is the rackmount ready S10000 from that post -

 

[3DVagabond]

Actually its the Tesla/Firestream cards that normally end up in those servers.

Id never heard of a server that uses say a Quadro/Firepro based cards since most of them end up in desktop workstation PCs for say a mechanical engineer working in solidworks on a project that involves 500+ parts.

And I always wonder how important those OpenCL benchmarks are especially when nVIDIA doesn't quite care about OpenCL because of CUDA.

I agree that these aren't server cards but are workstation cards. It doesn't mean they can't and won't work just fine in servers, though.

As far as workstations go, you don't generally see more than one high end card like this used, maybe two. If someone is going to set up a rack of these things it isn't going to be sitting on their desktop whirring away. While I'm sure 4 of these crammed onto an EATX motherboard will be loud and hot, 4 open air coolers aren't even an option.

As far as OpenCL goes, it's more important today than it was a year or two ago, and not as important as it will be in the future. Adobe and Autodesk are major forces in professional graphics. While CUDA is used it's to a limited degree, it appears to be losing it's foothold. HPC? Different story. AMD hasn't really made any inroads with OpenCL there. It's still early days though.

 

[Silverforce11]

More noise or more cash as I'm able to finish my workloads faster and thus improve my productivity?

Such a tough choice!

You don't get it do you?

It doesn't have to be a choice. It's a $3999 product, AMD can't afford an extra $20 to make a good cooler? Are you kidding me? It's a disgrace that they put out such a product at its price.

Noisy -check
High temps - check
Throttling under sustained load and losing performance - check
Wasting more power than it has to because its running at 94C - check

Could be a non issue if they get their heads out of their rear end and learned their lesson from the R290/X launch.

This card is marketed at workstations. With several workstations in an office running intensive apps, it is going to seriously annoy anyone working on them. I know from first hand experience as I work on my rig while it was mining and the noise is simply unacceptable.