Armari Magnetar M16E-AW1200-GPU Workstation Review

The most significantly new feature of the Armari Magnetar M16E-AW1200-GPU is the AMD Fire Pro W8100, which was only recently launched, and this is our first taste of its abilities.

It was high time there were new members of the FirePro range, as AMD launched the W8000 and W9000 almost exactly two years ago. In the interim, NVIDIA has gone from the Fermi-based Quadro 4000 and 5000 to the Kepler-based K4000 and K5000.

The latter is the most direct competitor to the W8100, and later in this review we will be comparing performance between the two cards on this system.

The W8100 is a significant step up from the W8000 it replaces. It now sports 2,560 Stream Processors, compared to the W8000's 1,792, although the core frequency has dropped slightly from 900MHz to 824MHz. The frame buffer complement has doubled from 4GB to 8GB of GDDR5 memory, and although the frequency has dropped from 1,375MHz to 1,250MHz, the bus has doubled from 256-bit to 512-bit, so bandwidth has burgeoned from 176GB/sec to 320GB/sec.

All these figures come together to provide significant on-paper speed increases, with 4.2TFLOPS of single-precision and 2.1TFLOPS of double-precision performance. Acceleration API support has increased slightly, with DirectX 11.2 now supported, alongside OpenCL 2.0, although OpenGL remains at 4.2, rather than the 4.3 support provided by NVIDIA's latest Quadros. On the downside, this is a slightly more Watt-hungry card, with Thermal Design Power increased from 189W to 220W.

It's a sign of the times that the consumer graphics card based on the same GPU as the W8100 was launched over six months ago. However, NVIDIA has a similarly lengthy hiatus between consumer and professional graphics releases, and the significant increase in processing ability under the W8100's hood means it promises a much greater challenge to NVIDIA's Kepler-based Quadros, in particular the K5000, which has an identical recommended retail price.

The 8GB of frame buffer could be particularly useful as texture maps increase in detail and size.

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