ATI FireGL V7600

Mainstream professional graphics accelerators from AMD are currently represented by two solutions: ATI FireGL V7600 and ATI FireGL V7700. Unfortunately, AMD didn’t provide us with their newer solution, V7700 that is why we had to test only the FireGL V7600 card. This card currently sells for $900.

ATI FireGL V7600 is based on a relatively old R600GL GPU manufactured with 80nm process. Although the manufacturer formally puts ATI FireGL V7600 and ATI FireGL V7700 into the same generation and price range, ATI FireGL V7700 looks a little bit more attractive, as it is based on a 55nm RV670 chip. However, both 7XXX graphics accelerators perform at close speeds in professional applications.

ATI FireGL V7600 core with 240 shader and 16 pixel processors works at 600MHz. So, in terms of its major technical parameters and theoretical fillrate of 9.6GPixel/s ATI FireGL V7600 is comparable with Radeon HD 2900 GT. Just like the gaming analogue, this professional solution features 512MB of GDDR3 SDRAM working at 1.6GHz frequency. So, the memory bandwidth on ATI FireGL V7600 with a 256-bit bus equals 51GB/s.

Looks like GPU-Z utility faces some difficulty in detecting the specs 
of our ATI FireGL V7600…

Since this graphics card uses a relatively old chip, ATI FireGL V7600 is incompatible with PCI Express x16 2.0 and the card supports only the first version of this protocol providing half the bandwidth. However, professional graphics cards very rarely need to transfer large textures and do not support Crossfire, so incompatibility with the new bus standard is not that big of a deal.

The exterior looks of ATI FireGL V7600 is very similar to that of its gaming analogue. It has a common form-factor for graphics cards of this class (242mm long) and a massive dual-slot cooler using some copper parts, two 6mm heatpipes and a powerful centrifugal fan. This cooler is covered with a plastic casing and exhausts the air outside the system case. The card requires additional power supply, so it has an 8-pin power connector, which can also use a 6-pin plug.

On the card rear panel there are two Dual-Link DVI outs and a connector for stereoscopic glasses, which can only be found on professional graphics accelerators these days. I would like to add that ATI FireGL V7600 is bundled with a component adapter for HDMI devices.