Hands-On: Dell Precision M6500 Workstation
Intel Core i7-720QM | ATI FirePro M7740 | 17.30" | 3.9 kg
The AMD ATI FirePro M7740 is a high-end professional graphics adapter for laptops. It suppports certified drivers for professional CAD (Computer aided Design) and DCC (Digital Content Creation) applications. In addition to the guarantee that these programs run flawlessly, the driver and BIOS are also optimized for OpenGL performance and even enables a few professional features in the GPU (e.g., anti-aliasing).
The core of the FirePro M7740 is based on the consumer Mobility Radeon HD 4860 under the RV740 architecture. The GPU is produced at TSMC in 40nm and offers 640 (or 128 5-D) unified shaders that support DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.1. As for graphics memory, the card supports up to 1 GB of GDDR5 with a 128 bit memory bus. Due to the relatively fast speeds from GDDR5, the relatively small memory bus should not be a noticeable bottle neck.
The ATI FirePro / FireGL M7740 was introduced in the Dell Precision M6400 mobile workstation as an alternative to the already available Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M. AMD was able to compare both graphics cards in a subset of the SPECviewperf 10 OpenGL benchmark. The FirePro M7740 in the Dell Precision M6400 was compared to an Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M in an HP 8730w. According to AMD, the M7740 won in 8 subsets of the benchmark (ugnx-01, tcvis-01, sw-02, proe-04, maya-02, ensight-03, 3dsmax-04) and in the Composite Score (approx. 75 versus 63).
Compared to desktop workstation cards, the M7740 should perform better than the FirePro V7750, the latter of which includes only 320 stream processors and GDDR3 memory.
Like the Mobility Radeon HD 4860, the Mobility Fire Pro M7740 features the UVD 2 video processor for decoding of HD video streams. The GPU should be fully compliant to Blu-ray specs with the possibility to decode up two streams simultaneously.
FirePro M7000 Series
| |||||||
Codename | RV740 | ||||||
Architecture | Terascale 1 | ||||||
Pipelines | 640 - unified | ||||||
Core Speed | 650 MHz | ||||||
Memory Speed | 1000 MHz | ||||||
Memory Bus Width | 128 Bit | ||||||
Memory Type | GDDR5 | ||||||
Max. Amount of Memory | 1024 MB | ||||||
Shared Memory | no | ||||||
API | DirectX 10.1, Shader 4.1 | ||||||
Transistor Count | 826 Million | ||||||
technology | 40 nm | ||||||
Features | OpenGL 3.1 | ||||||
Notebook Size | large | ||||||
Date of Announcement | 04.08.2009 | ||||||
Link to Manufacturer Page | www.amd.com |
For more games that might be playable and a list of all games and graphics cards visit our Gaming List
Dell Precision M6500: Intel Core i7-720QM, 17.30", 3.9 kg
External Review » Dell Precision M6500
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