AMD FirePro V7800 and V4800 Professional Graphics Review

A complete lineup

With our review of the V7800 and V4800 FirePro graphics cards from AMD we are basically completing the new Evergreen-based lineup for professional graphics users. The V8800 flagship still dominates but the V7800 is a nice option at about half the price while the V4800 improves performance over the base V3800 for under $200.

If you are keeping count, today’s article will mark the completion of a five card lineup (actually the sixth will be coming down the line eventually) from AMD of their new Evergreen-based professional GPUs. Our first article looked at the new architectural benefits that Evergreen brought to the professional market so you will definitely want to start there if this is your first run through of the latest generation of cards from AMD. The FirePro V8800 was spotlighted in that piece.

Shortly after that we got our hands on the new FirePro V5800 and V3800 cards that made up the mid-range and budget professional offerings. Now we finally are testing the remaining two options, the FirePro V7800 and V5800.

The Circle is Now Complete

The FirePro V7800 is much closer to the V8800 than any other Evergreen-based FirePro offering thus far. It includes a 2GB frame buffer but drops from 1600 shader processors to 1440. While it does support Eyefinity technology (as all the FirePros will now) it has outputs for three displays rather than the four we see available on the V8800. The V7800 uses a single slot cooler so it should be able to find its way into smaller, less power hungry systems.



The V4800 is a shorter single slot graphics card uses a noticeably smaller and less powerful GPU of only 400 stream processors and includes a 1GB GDDR5 frame buffer. Three-panel Eyefinity support remains though.



With the addition of these two cards the new FirePro lineup is basically complete:



Almost perfectly in line with what options are available on the consumer side of the AMD graphics market, the FirePro line of GPUs includes options from the full 1600 shader Cypress core down to the 400 shader Redwood GPU and with prices from $1499 to $109.