AMD Radeon PRO W6000 (RDNA 2)

The professional workstation GPU market is very different than the consumer, gaming GPU space, but AMD's RDNA 2 architecture and the Radeon Pro W6800 seem well-suited to the vastly different workloads. Professional designers and creators in the market for a powerful, workstation-class GPU should give the new Radeon Pro W6800 a serious look. Using MSRPs as a guide, the Radeon Pro W6800 appears to be a good value in the current pro-vis landscape, especially if your use case requires some of the development tools where the card's performance is particularly strong, or if its big 32GB of GDDR6 memory pool will come into play.

Manchmal kann etwas weniger durchaus mehr sein, zumindest aus Sicht des Marketings und bestimmter Zielgroppen. Das, was AMD mit der Radeon Pro W6400 für den Desktop und den beiden mobilen Chips Radeon Pro W6500M und W6300M jetzt anbietet, bäckt zwar auch den ersten Blick auch nur die ganz kleinen Brötchen, ist aber für die anvisierte Zielgruppe nicht nur völlig ausreichend, sondern bietet auch noch diverse Features, die diese Zielgruppe beim grünen Mitbewerber aktuell vermissen soll. Diese Ansicht muss man natürlich auch differenzieren, aber so ganz Unrecht hat da AMDs Marketing ganz offensichtlich auch wieder nicht.

Workstation-Grafikkarten müssen keine Rechenmonster sein, für manche Aufgaben reichen sparsame Karten. Im Test hat AMDs Radeon Pro W6400 gezeigt, was sie kann.

When AMD briefed us on the Radeon Pro W6400, it teased “A New King’s Arriving”. That gave us the impression that a GPU even more powerful than the W6800 would be launching, so you can imagine our surprise when the next slides showed a cute little workstation GPU that doesn’t even require an external power connector!

For a modern, low-power, small form factor desktop, in a professional environment where pro-vis ISV certifications matter though, the $229 Radeon Pro W6400 represents the lowest priced entry-point for a workstation GPU. There’s much more performance available with a larger investment in a higher-end GPU, but for light-duty workloads the Radeon Pro W6400 may fit the bill if its shortcomings won’t affect your workflow.

AMD has set the MSRP for the Radeon Pro W6600 at $649, which is a bit lower than previous-gen cards like the Radeon Pro WX 7100 ($699), significantly lower then the W5700 ($1,199), but somewhat higher than the W5500 ($469). Checking current street prices, it's also about half the price of the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000.