Uncooked horsepower is usually an important issue in relation to workstation graphics playing cards, however it’s not the one issue price contemplating. Energy, dimension, warmth output, and worth are all key concerns as effectively. Whereas the AMD Radeon Professional W7500 isn’t the quickest choice round, it excels in all of those different areas. At $429, the W7500 is likely one of the least costly present workstation playing cards in the marketplace. This tantalizing worth together with its different attributes make it an alluring choice for many who want workstation efficiency on a price range.
Design: A Workstation Radeon RX 7600—No Further Energy Wanted
The Radeon Professional W7500 relies on the AMD Navi 33 GPU die, which is identical GPU core used contained in the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and the Radeon Professional W7600. In complete, this GPU has 2,048 streaming processors, 128 TMUs (Texture Mapping Items), 64 ROPs (Raster Operation Processors), 64 AI accelerators, and 32 ray accelerators, all of that are lively and obtainable on each the Radeon RX 7600 and the Radeon Professional W7600.
After all, the Radeon Professional W7500 ships with a few of these assets disabled, dropping its core depend down barely to 1,792 streaming processors, 112 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 56 AI accelerators, and 28 ray accelerators. Clock velocity can also be decreased in contrast with the Radeon RX 7600 and the Radeon Professional W7600, with the Radeon Professional W7500 coming clocked at 1,500MHz with a lift clock of 1,700MHz.
The reminiscence interface has been saved the identical on all three of those playing cards, however the Radeon Professional W7500 nonetheless comes up a bit brief right here in contrast with the Radeon Professional W7600 and the Radeon RX 7600. All three playing cards had been designed with a 128-bit connection to 8GB of GDDR6 video RAM. The velocity at which the Radeon Professional W7500’s RAM operates is considerably decrease than its counterparts, nonetheless, giving it peak reminiscence bandwidth of simply 172GB per second in contrast with the Radeon Professional W7600’s peak bandwidth of 288GB per second.
These reductions in {hardware} assets, clock velocity, and bandwidth are sure to hamper the Radeon Professional W7500’s efficiency and push it effectively under the Radeon Professional W7600. We have discovered some benefits to this case, nonetheless, as this additionally pushes down energy consumption, which in time period reduces warmth manufacturing. This enabled AMD to create the Radeon Professional W7500 with no PCIe energy connector, because it’s merely pointless. The cardboard is ready to attract all the facility it wants from the motherboard’s PCIe slot.
This allowed AMD to scale back the size of the Radeon Professional W7500 to only 8.5 inches moderately than the 9.5 inches of the Radeon Professional W7600. This distinction doesn’t change a lot in all fact, however does assist to chop prices some and could also be advantageous in some cramped PC instances.
Aside from that, the Radeon Professional W7500 is general fairly just like the Radeon Professional W7600, with a single-slot thermal answer with only one fan. The Radeon Professional W7500 additionally has 4 DisplayPort 2.1 ports on its rear I/O panel with assist for a single 8K monitor or two excessive refresh-rate 4K shows. AV1 encoding and decoding assist can also be built-in, together with 12-bit show colour output assist for content material creation functions.
Take a look at Setup and Spec Comparability
The system I used to check the Radeon Professional W7500 was our present GPU check mattress that was first assembled in 2022. It contains a stock-clocked Intel Core i9-12900K processor on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard. The processor is cooled by a Corsair Hydro Sequence H100X water cooler, and it has entry to 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM clocked at 5,600MHz.
The ability provide on this system is a Corsair HX1500, rated to deal with 1,500 watts of energy, and all checks had been carried out within Home windows 11 Professional with the entire newest updates put in.
From the chart, you may see that the Radeon Professional W7500 is missing fairly a bit on a number of fronts from the opposite playing cards that we examined. Naturally, this reveals in our check charts as effectively, with the Radeon Professional W7500 constantly on the backside. This shouldn’t be considered as an issue or design flaw of the Radeon Professional W7500, although. One thing must be on the underside, and, on this state of affairs, the Radeon Professional W7500 is actually designed to be that factor.
The Radeon Professional W7500 ought to ship some efficiency enhancements over AMD’s last-gen Radeon Professional 6000-series playing cards, in accordance with AMD, however we didn’t have certainly one of these playing cards available for back-testing. The most important benefits the Radeon Professional W7500 has, nonetheless, are its decreased energy draw, warmth output, bodily footprint, and value.
Artificial Assessments
Artificial check outcomes all the time have to be thought of fastidiously, as they aren’t consultant of true real-world workloads, however they nonetheless can assist us to check particular capabilities of a card. 3DMark has a number of checks rolled into it which might be largely supposed to check gaming graphics playing cards, however its Port Royal check can assist to point out us how effectively the cardboard’s ray-tracing {hardware} performs. Equally, Luxmark is focused at testing GPGPU efficiency, and Adobe’s Premiere Professional checks each rendering and GPGPU efficiency.
The Radeon Professional W7500 fell to the underside of the chart in all these checks; get used to seeing it in that spot, as this state of affairs persists throughout many of the remainder of the charts. Keep in mind, that is to be anticipated for the worth and energy profile.
SPECworkstation 3.1
The checks in SPECworkstation 3.1 give the Radeon Professional W7500 a uncommon alternative to shine, because it’s designed to particularly check workstation playing cards in a lot of completely different situations.
In most of those checks, the Radeon Professional W7500 was nonetheless the slowest choice, however it managed to drag forward of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 within the snx-03 (Siemens’ NX 8.0 CAD) check. In just a few different checks, the Radeon Professional W7500 drew considerably close to the RTX 4090. The RTX 4090 was nonetheless sooner general however its lead narrowed to a 43% benefit in medical-02, a 38% benefit in sw-04 (Solidworks), and a bonus of simply 13% in catia-05 (Dassault Systémes’ Catia).
That will not appear spectacular, however when you think about that the RTX 4090 prices $1,599 in contrast with the Radeon Professional W7500’s $429, it begins to look a bit extra so. Workstation playing cards are designed so to use a number of playing cards collectively in a single system, and including a second or third Radeon Professional W7500 would seemingly give the Radeon Professional W7500 the benefit in these checks whereas nonetheless costing an excellent deal much less.
AIDA64 GPGPU Assessments
One other extremely helpful check for each workstation playing cards and graphics playing cards alike is AIDA64’s GPGPU check. This utility checks a number of points of a graphics card and might be deeply informative.
The Radeon Professional W7500 remained steadfast on the backside of the charts for all of those checks, however the outcomes nonetheless give us a transparent thought of how the cardboard would carry out in encryption, floating level, and different workloads.
Recreation Assessments
Video games are computationally demanding, which makes them glorious for testing a card’s uncooked efficiency potential, even when that is under no circumstances a gaming card.
For a contemporary card that doesn’t want a PCIe energy connection, the Radeon Professional W7500’s efficiency numbers had been spectacular. Positive, it was slower than the opposite playing cards we examined, however it nonetheless achieved playable body charges at 1080p with maxed settings in F1 22, and this recreation was playable at 1440p with FSR enabled, too. Whole Battle: Three Kingdoms was additionally playable at 1080p and 1440p with maxed settings. These outcomes make me want we might get a price range shopper model of an AMD graphics card for gaming just like the Radeon Professional W7500, however in the meanwhile that appears unlikely.
Energy Consumption
I examined the facility of the GPU check mattress utilizing a Kill-A-Watt wall meter in an effort to achieve some thought of how a lot energy consumption every card consumes. This isn’t precise, because the figures included the facility consumption of the processor, RAM, and the remainder of the system elements, however as solely the graphics card was modified between checks, many of the distinction in energy draw will likely be all the way down to the cardboard being examined.
This check is likely one of the few wherein the Radeon Professional W7500 excelled, with the cardboard consuming scarce little energy in the course of the AIDA64 GPGPU check. Whole system energy peaked at 149 watts throughout that check, which is comparatively low. It drew a fraction of the facility of most different playing cards, with even the Radeon Professional W7600 consuming a good bit extra.
Verdict:
The Radeon Professional W7500 was designed to be AMD’s budget-friendly choice in its Radeon Professional 7000 sequence of workstation playing cards, however with this comes a number of different incentives that make the Radeon Professional W7500 a compelling buy. If you’re solely centered on efficiency outcomes, different playing cards just like the Radeon W7600 or a gaming-first GPU just like the RTX 4090 might stand out as higher choices, and relying in your workload that could possibly be right.
If it is advisable to pack extra horsepower right into a compact system that may run workstation purposes, nonetheless, the Radeon Professional W7500 then turns into an interesting answer. Its single-slot compact design makes it extra interesting for a lot of these techniques which have little room for including playing cards and restricted cooling potential. These techniques usually have comparatively low-wattage energy provides, too, which makes the Radeon Professional W7500’s comparatively low energy draw doubly effectively suited.
We can also’t ignore its $429 worth level, which makes it a extremely reasonably priced choice for price range workstation techniques. This low worth, coupled with the compact dimension of the cardboard, makes the W7500 particularly effectively suited to including further playing cards right into a system, too, which can assist to spice up efficiency. We have now little question that the AMD Radeon Professional W7500 is a little bit of a distinct segment product focused at a particular a part of the market. However, for these edge instances, it is effectively price contemplating.
