Review: Sapphire FirePro W9100

Conclusion

The recent trend in consumer PC graphics cards has favoured Nvidia's GeForce cards over AMD's Radeon. Sapphire realised the tide was turning some time ago and has duly invested in professional workstation graphics marketed under the FirePro banner.

Currently headlined by the Hawaii-based W9100, Sapphire is the only AMD partner in a position to retail their own card after inking an exclusive global agreement a couple of years ago, albeit with cards based on the reference design.

These professional GPUs require different evaluation than their gaming cousins, and, playing to its strengths, the W9100's enhanced double-precision ability comes to the fore when absolute accuracy of calculation is key.

Performance is generally better in pure synthetic tests than with benchmarks based on real-world applications, where Nvidia's latest professional cards tend to do better, particularly the recently-introduced Quadro M6000.

Workstation users who need flexible outputs and solid performance in large-dataset double-precision workloads - which is more common than you may at first think - should certainly consider the Sapphire FirePro W9100 as the card of choice. Masses of onboard memory, a proven architecture and excellent connectivity are the standout features of this premium professional card.

Sapphire AMD FirePro W9100

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The Sapphire FirePro W9100 professional graphics card is available to purchase from Scan Computers*.

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