AMD Radeon Pro W7700 Review: Hitting The Sub-$1000, Pro-Vis Sweet Spot

	AMD Radeon Pro W7700: $999 MSRP The RDNA 3-based AMD Radeon Pro W7700 features 16GB of memory, the company's latest GPU architectire, and aggressive pricing.
	Good Performance 16GB Of Memory Aggressive Pricing Quiet Operation Unmatched Display Output Config Manageable Form Factor	Ray Tracing Trails NVIDIA Sometimes Trails W6800 We Miss The Beautiful YInMn Blue

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We're going to fill you in on a little secret: we’ve known about the AMD Radeon Pro W7700 for a while now. Then again, if you’ve paid any sort of attention to the professional workstation graphics market lately, you probably knew about it too. You see, over the last couple of months, AMD has released a quartet of professional Radeon Pro GPUs, including the powerful, high-end Radeon Pro W7900 and W7800, and the more affordable, mainstream Radeon Pro W7600 and W7500. The big daddies in the line-up are packing 48GB and 32GB of memory, respectively, while the mainstream workhorses pack 8GB. The Radeon Pro W7900 and W7800 also command a healthy premium, while the W7600 and W7500 are available for a few hundred a piece. Disregarding the obvious gap in the naming convention, there was a gaping hole in the middle of the line-up, just begging to be filled. And that’s where the aptly named Radeon Pro W7700 with 16GB of memory slots in.

As has been in the case with the entire Radeon Pro W7x00 series, AMD is being rather aggressive with the pricing of the Radeon Pro W7700, which gives it a rather appealing value proposition relative to other professional workstation GPUs. We’ll fill you in with the specifics on the pages ahead. For now, let’s digest some specs and take a look at the card itself...

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If you've read any of our previous Radeon Pro W7x00 series reviews, you'll immediately see that the new Radeon Pro W7700 has a similar overall appearance to the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon Pro W7800. But looks can be deceiving; the Radeon Pro W7700 differs from its more-powerful (and pricier) siblings in a number of ways.


First off, the W7700 is configured with 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, connected to the GPU via 256-bit interface, for a maximum of 576GB/s of bandwidth. That's similar bandwidth to the Radeon Pro W7800, but only half of the memory capacity (the W7800 has 32GB). GPU cores / CUs are also scaled down versus the W7800, which results in reduced compute performance, but also lower power. As such, the new Radeon Pro W7700 requires only a single supplemental 8-pin power feed.

As you can see in the table above, versus previous-gen Radeon Pro W6x00 series cards, the Radeon Pro W7700 falls somewhere in between the Radeon Pro W6600 and W6800 in terms of total stream processors and compute units -- the Radeon Pro W7700 has 3,072 stream processors arranged in 48 CUs, by the way -- but due to the inherent benefits of the newer RDNA3 architecture and higher operating frequencies, the Radeon Pro W7700 crushes both previous-gen cards in terms of compute performance. Obviously, it falls in-line between the Radeon Pro W7800 and W7600 with this current generation.
As we mentioned in our Radeon Pro W7600 / W7500 review, AMD has moved away from the YInMn blue color scheme for its Radeon Pro products, and the latest cards have an understated black-and-silver aesthetic. The workstation market doesn’t have an affinity for wild designs, like gamers do, but we’re going to miss that beautiful blue nonetheless. In terms of its overall size, the Radeon Pro W7700 is the same height and width of the Radeon Pro W7800 (barely higher than the case bracket, and two-slots wide), but the W7700 is about an inch shorter.
The Radeon Pro W7700 is built around the same Navi 32 GPU as the recently released Radeon RX 7800 / 7700 cards, but the number of active CUs has been further scaled back versus those consumer cards. Scaling back the GPU and tweaking the clocks, however, ultimately results in a lower power. Whereas the top-end Radeon Pro calls for up to 295W, and the Radeon RX 7700 XT has a 245W TDP, the Radeon Pro W7700 is specc'ed for only 190W. That lower peak power, in conjunction with is dual-slot cooling solution, should help to keep the card relatively cool and quiet.

At first glance, you might think that the single blower-style fan on the Radeon Pro W7700 makes it somewhat noisier than its consumer-class counterparts, which feature multiple axial fans, but that is not the case. The Radeon Pro W7700 was surprisingly quiet during normal operation, and even under prolonged, sustained load, when its fan spins up, the card remains relatively quiet. We'll have more on acoustics later.
In terms of its display outputs, DisplayPort 2.1 support gives the Radeon Pro W7700 the capability of outputting high-resolution display streams up to 12K60, using compression, or 8K60 without it. It also can drive 8K resolution displays up to 120Hz, and a wide array of high-refresh, or multi-display 4K configurations. The actual outputs consist of a quartet of full-sized DisplayPorts -- no HDMI or mini-DP.

And with all of that out of the way, lets check out some benchmarks...