AMD Radeon Pro W6800, W6600 and W6600M at a glance with own pictures and a first hands-on test

1 - Introduction and Key Features for the W6000 Line-up 2 - Radeon Pro W6800 Datasheet and Details 3 - Radeon Pro W6600 Datasheet and Details 4 - Radeon Pro W6600M Datasheet and Details 5 - Hand-On of the Radeon Pro W6800 and Preview

Since today’s launch was timed a bit awkwardly to NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (intentionally?) and my resources aren’t infinite either, the detailed review of the Radeon Pro W6800 will have to wait a bit longer. But it will come, and I’ll also try to round up NVIDIA’s counterpart, the Quadro RTX A4000, to update AMD’s slide content a wee bit more. Of course, I can already provide a first hands-on and also provide you with the data, which most data sheets unfortunately do not give.

The technical specs don’t even read that bad, even compared to the previous version:

In addition to this, AMD advertises the following features:

▪ 60 Compute Units mit Realtime Hardware Raytracing Unterstützung
▪ 32 GB GDDR6 Speicher mit ECC-Unterstützung und 128 MB AMD Infinity Cache
▪ Radeon™ Pro Software in Enterprise-Qualität für Unternehmen
▪ Zertifiziert für viele beliebte professionelle Softwareanwendungen
▪ Optimiert für bis zu sechs 4K-Displays (8K und HDR Ready)
▪ Volle API-Unterstützung für DirectX® 12 Ultimate, Vulkan®, OpenGL® 4.6, OpenCL™ 2.1
▪ Unterstützung für Enkodieren und Dekodieren von H.264, HEVC, VP9 und AV1-Dekodierung
▪ Unterstützung der PCIe® 4.0-Technologie
▪ Remote Workstation Ready
▪ AMD Smart Access Memory Technologie (SAM)
▪ Bis zu 19,25 Teraflops FP32-Durchsatz in der Spitze

Unboxing and connectivity

Now let’s move on to the externals. The card weighs, attention, exactly 1111 grams. With an installation length of 26.8 cm from the outside of the slot bracket to the end of the card, it is exactly in the usual range. With 3.8 cm thickness and the partial 4 mm start backplate (including air gap) this card is a perfect dual-slot design. The installation height from the upper edge of the PCIe slot to the upper edge of the case is the usual 10.5 cm. That one relies on a radial fan and DHE (Direct Heat Exhaust)

There are a total of 16 modules of GDDR6 memory installed, so 8 modules also have to move to the back. Therefore, AMD uses at least half a backplate for this card also for passive cooling of the memory modules. which makes sense.

With a total of up to six 4K displays (8K and HDR Ready), they even offer more than NVIDIA on a single card. Whether you really need it is another matter for now.

The 8- and 6-pin power connectors are located at the end of the card, as usual for workstation cards. The 250 watts specified as TBP are also achieved in many demanding load scenarios. However, for the sake of simplicity, you could have used 2x 8-pin.

With that, I’ll conclude the short hands-on for now, because benchmarks will be available from the new workstation – also in comparison to the relevant cards of the competitor. Otherwise it would be boring. And to bridge the time until then, I have a few benchmarks from AMD for you. There is certainly some cherry picking involved, but the values are quite plausible.

Bench 01

Bench 02

Bench 03

Bench 04

Bench 05

Finally, here is the tabular summary with profits and losses. TTYL