AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics architecture has proven to significantly improve performance and deliver greater energy efficiency, which is great news for gamers. But for workstation cards, this kind of performance improvement may be more ideal. We've learned that high-performance RDNA 3 workstation cards will work with the AMD Radeon Pro W7800 ($599). And now, with the Radeon Pro W7600, we see a balanced solution that excels with low power consumption and a compact form factor. This is undoubtedly a good choice for users who need high performance but pay attention to energy efficiency and space.
Design: Radeon RX 7600 in action
Anyone who follows the latest graphics card releases will find the Radeon Pro W7600 familiar. This is because the card is similar to the AMD Radeon RX 7600 in many ways. Both cards have the same GPU cores, the exact same amount of available resources, and even the same memory interface. You'll notice that there are only a few details that differ between the two cards.
Workstation cards are often packed into a chassis with as many other cards as possible for extra performance, which makes the size and cooling scheme of the card more important than with consumer-grade graphics cards, which are consumed today Most graphics cards are installed separately. This led AMD to design the W7600 as a more complacent single-slot card, allowing you to plug more cards together than a dual-slot card. Of course, this comes with some trade-offs, including a smaller cooler and slightly lower clock speeds.
Beyond that, the biggest change between the W7600 and RX 7600 is the BIOS, which is optimized for workstation tasks on the W7600. You'll also notice a price difference of $599 for the W7600, which is more than double the Radeon RX 7600's base price of $269. Professional-grade products are priced differently for businesses and are often purchased in bulk.
The ports on this card are also slightly changed compared to the Radeon RX 7600, with no HDMI port and four DisplayPort 2.1 connections. Power connections can vary on Radeon RX 7600 cards, but most of them also come with a single 8-pin PCIe power connection, while the Radeon Pro W7600 relies on a single 6-pin PCIe power connection.
Test Setup and Specs Comparison
The AMD Radeon Pro W7600 was tested using our 2022 GPU test bench with an Intel Core i9-12900K processor and an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard. The processor runs at stock clock speeds with a Corsair Hydro Series H100X water cooler and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM clocked at 5,600MHz.
To ensure that the system had sufficient power for all tests, I equipped the test bench with a Corsair HX1500i power supply that can handle up to 1,500 watts of power. All testing was conducted in Windows 11 Pro with all latest updates installed.
Before we dive into the test results, it's important to note that the Radeon Pro W7600 and the similar Radeon Pro W7500 are significantly different from other graphics cards we've been able to test. These AMD GPUs are cheaper, more compact, and of course have far fewer resources. This resulted in them performing well in most tests. However, on the rare occasions when they pull ahead slightly, we're sure it's entirely due to the inherent advantages of these workstation cards.
Synthetic Tests
3DMark’s Port Royal is a useful graphics card test that takes full advantage of the ray tracing hardware on your GPU. Adobe's Premiere Pro and Luxmark both focus on testing content creation and GPGPU performance.
Although the Radeon Pro W7600 performs poorly in these tests compared to other graphics cards, it's still a good performance when considering the price/performance ratio. The Radeon Pro W7800 sells for $2,499, which makes the $599 W7600, with a third or more of its performance figures, look like a steal. For these specific tests, however, you'd be better off with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which is faster than both and only costs $999.
SPEC Workstation 3.1
More workstation card-oriented tests, such as those included in the SPECworkstation 3.1 test suite, give us a better idea of the Radeon Pro W7600's potential.
The Radeon Pro W7600 still performs at least about a third of the Radeon Pro W7800 in all of these tests, and it performs significantly better than the Radeon Pro W7800 in many tests. This may not sound like a win for the Radeon Pro W7600, but it's worth remembering that these cards are designed to work with other workstation cards. You can buy four Radeon Pro W7600 cards for slightly less than the price of one Radeon Pro W7800 card, and the cards working together will likely deliver better results than a single W7800 card.
That said, we can't say exactly how well it will perform, since scaling across multiple cards has never been that simple. Still, this will likely result in better overall performance than the Radeon Pro W7800. This also holds true when compared to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, which already lags behind the Radeon Pro W7600 on specific test sets like Medical-02, snx-03 (Siemens CAD), and sw-04 (Solidworks). In many tests that show the RTX 4090 ahead, adding a second Radeon Pro W7600 tends to even the score, or hand the victory to the Radeon Pro W7600 card.
AIDA64 GPGPU Test
AIDA64 has proven to be very useful for testing workstation cards and graphics cards alike. It tests a lot of different metrics, but doesn't tend to support workstation cards.
AIDA64's memory bandwidth section gives us insight into the bandwidth between RAM and GPU on the graphics card, which is always critical for performance. The Radeon Pro W7600 only has a 128-bit memory interface, which puts it at a disadvantage here. That's part of what caused it to lag behind other cards in this test, and its significantly smaller resources was another part of what held it back.
While these results look bleak, it's again worth considering the significant difference in price, as the performance is better than you'd expect from a card that costs far less than the competition.
Game Testing
Workstation cards are not meant for gaming, but gaming does a pretty good job of pushing the card to its limits and measuring its performance, so we won't be using them here as " Funny narration" to test.
While you can get similar results for less with the RX 7600, the Radeon Pro W7600 ran the games we tested just fine even at higher resolutions. Running the game at 4K is a bit difficult, but that's thanks to FSR boosting the framerate to playable levels.
Energy Consumption
I measured the overall power consumption of the GPU test bench using a Kill-A-Watt power meter to determine the rough power consumption of each test card when running the AIDA64 GPGPU test. Only the problematic graphics card was replaced between tests, which gave us a relative idea of each card's power consumption.
In this area, the Radeon Pro W7600 is well ahead of the competition. In terms of performance, the Radeon Pro W7600 may have only a third of the output of the W7800, but it also consumes significantly less power. This makes the card more suitable for use in compact systems, especially those with tight power and thermal constraints.
Verdict: Ultra-Thin Sleep Workstation Card
AMD’s Radeon Pro W7600 performed relatively well in our tests. It never beat the competition, but that's to be expected since most competing cards cost much more, are much larger, and use far more power. Instead, the card performs quite well in the market, driving a lot of computing performance at a more affordable $599 price point, and with a more compact form factor and lower power consumption.
These features help it stand out among users who need a certain level of computing performance for workstation applications but don't need or can't afford something like the AMD Radeon Pro W7800. That said, if you don't need it to run workstation applications, its shine is lost. You'd better consider using a good and affordable consumer card.
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