AMD Firepro W8000 and W9000 Professional Graphics Cards Reviewed

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it
into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system
to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load
numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running
the LuxMark v2.0 benchmark with default settings.

Power Consumption Results: The AMD FirePro V8800 professional graphics card came out in April 2010 and was the first Cypress-based workstation graphics cards released by AMD. The AMD FirePro V8800 features 2GB of GDDR5 video memory with 147.2 GB/s of bandwidth, 1600 Stream processors, four DisplayPort outputs, ATI Eyefinity support, DirectX 11.0 / OpenGL 4.0 support, OpenCL 1.0 capable, a full 30-bit display pipeline, Multi-View display support, and much. More importantly, the FirePro V8800 is built using a 40nm manufacturing process. This AMD FirePro V8800 didn’t appear to use that much power, but once we plugged in the new AMD FirePro W8000 we found a significant power reduction. This is thanks to the Tahiti-based core and the new 28nm manufacturing process by TSMC we found the AMD FirePro W8000 to use ~40 Watts less power under load and 13 Watts less at idle. The AMD FirePro W9000 was the fastest in the benchmarks, but as you can see it also uses less power than the AMD FirePro W8000 at both idle and load! AMD continues to improve power efficiency and when running more than one card the others turn off when not in use thanks to AMD ZeroCore power technology.