ATI has spent much of the last decade producing the FireGL line of high-end workstation graphics cards, very regularly challenging and often times besting competing products from NVIDIA's Quadro lineup. ATI's last generation of FireGL products, which we covered heavily, were excellent all around performers. Now it certainly wasn't perfect, but was definitely solid improvements over the generation of FireGL cards which preceded it. Now in late 2008, we are seeing ATI's first moves to eventually kill off the long known FireGL brand. Its replacement? ATI has yet to introduce top to bottom FirePro class products to replace the FireGL, but it's delivered the first four cards of many to come in the future. - HotHardware

ATI FirePro V8700 Workstation Graphics Card Review

The name change makes since, as high-end workstation cards are often used beyond the realm of 3D graphics today. Workstation class graphics cards are used for physics, general purpose computing, HPC and for game design, not just for OpenGL based modeling and CAD work. While the new FirePro lineup of cards are certainly just as fast as ever for OpenGL, ATI is doing its best to make it known that the cards are capable of much more. Sporting a new name, ATI has released four new workstation cards under the FirePro moniker. On the low-end you have the FirePro V3700 followed by the mid-range V3750 and V5700 models.

The FirePro V8700 currently reigns as ATI's top-tier flagship FirePro model, as the first workstation class card to ship which is based on ATI's RV770 graphics architecture. And as avid readers will no doubt realize, the RV770 is the same architecture which ATI used in its Radeon HD 4800 lineup for high-end gaming. As the RV770 graphics processor proved to be a smashing success for gamers with the Radeon HD 4800 series cards, ATI is hoping that workstation users will see the same type of benefits. Unlike most of the Radeon HD 4800 series lineup for gamers, the FirePro has some extra features to appeal to the professionals.

The first thing we noticed about the FirePro V8700 when removing it from its box is how small it is in comparison to ATI's previous generations of high-end FireGL products. Unlike its predecessors, the FirePro V8700 is not a full length ATX card, meaning it does not require an extended ATX sized chassis in order to run. The FirePro V8700 is dominated by its simple shiny black cooling system, which uses ATI's standardized design of a dual slot copper heatpipe equipped heatsink system coupled together with an embedded blower fan, which exhausts hot air out of the back of the chassis which is great to reduce the heat within the case.

While excessively loud upon system startup, the cooling system is very quiet during normal day to day use, even during intensive 3D workloads, we never heard the cooling system fire up to a point where it would become a nuisance when loaded in a tower chassis. ATI should definitely be commended for bringing down the noise level of their high-end FirePro products compared to the previous high-end FireGL cards. If you flip the PCB, you can see that the FirePro V8700 has a modern CrossFireX compatible multi GPU connector. However ATI does not support multi GPU operation on the FireGL lineup, so useless at this point.

ATI definitely chose the right GPU to use for the re-launch of the FirePro series of products. The FirePro is a massive shot in the arm for the product line and delivers on almost every front. ATI has not only addressed every major concern we had about their last generation FireGL V8600 series, but they have enhanced their workstation class product offerings in other ways as well, while keeping the price point in check. The result is a highly refined product which feels properly tuned to the workstation market. Performance wise, in nearly every benchmark the FirePro V8700 manages to outperform the previous generation.

Oddly enough, the FirePro V8700 is currently ATI's high-end product, but it has a less memory than the next fastest high-end product. It seems plausible to think that ATI could offer a 2GB model if there was industry demand for such a product however. Even better, the FirePro V8700 is far quieter than the prior generation FireGL products, while taking up less space and not requiring an extended ATX chassis. It's still power hungry and runs hot, but the cooling system handles the load much better this time around. The output ports are plentiful and doubled DisplayPort ensure that it's ready for the upcoming wave of DisplayPort monitors.

Not only has the board been modernized on the output front, but it supports a higher bandwidth PCI Express 2.0 interface. The FirePro V8700 is not perfect, of course. ATI still hasn't nailed down their multi GPU support as well as NVIDIA has, nor do their drivers have as much polish as NVIDIA's in our opinion. The card consumed significant amounts of power under load, it's still an expensive beast at $1499, and then there's the fact that the FirePro V8700 is not readily available on the market yet. Despite these minor flaws though, we are still very impressed with the overall FirePro V8700 product.

Excellent performance increases, very low noise, flexible outputs at a price point of nearly half that of ATI's prior generation high-end product. That's progress we can appreciate. We like where ATI has gone with this product lineup. Perhaps a 2GB model is on the horizon? We better keep the test bed warmed up.