The Sapphire FirePro W9100
Workstation cards tend to eschew the flair of consumer GPUs and instead use reference cooling. The rectangular slab and bright-red cooler are reminiscent of the styling employed on the HD 6790 series of cards where a radial fan pushed air across the heatsink and directly out of the back of the card. There's little reason for Sapphire to change appearance for a professional GPU, of course, but the concern is such cooling won't keep the underlying Hawaii GPU particularly quiet and cool.
The card measures 12in long though the effective length is longer because AMD situates the two power connectors on the left-hand side. One would need a chassis with at least 350mm of room to house the W9100 comfortably.
Note the strange-looking connector to the right of the PCIe inputs? It's for a FirePro synchronisation module that, as the name suggests, synchronises the display output to ensure card(s) in one system all output correctly to multiple screens.
Out back a metal plate gives the card suitable rigidity. We found it to become quite warm to the touch when the GPU was under load, and closer examination reveals it's effective at transferring the heat away from the memory that's also located on the back. All told there's 16GB of ECC GDDR5 memory housed on the board.
We often comment on the ever-expanding nature of frame buffers for consumer cards; the workstation market demands much larger onboard caches due to the more complex datasets that need to be processed.
The plain-Jane exterior belies the massive processing power under the hood of this £2,500 card. This card can, in optimal conditions, process 2.6TFLOPS of double-precision compute.
Driving six displays is a cinch for the W9100. Catering for the widest possible audience for professional graphics, the card also carries a 3-pin mini-DIN connector not commonly seen otherwise.
