AMD FirePro M5100 vs AMD Radeon R9 M295X

AMD FirePro M5100

The AMD FirePro M5100 is a middle-class graphics card for mobile workstations, which has been presented in mid-2013. Similar to the Nvidia Quadro series, the FirePro cards offer certified drivers for professional 3D-software like CAD. Due to optimizations and some unlocked features, the performance in these applications is much better compared to a consumer Radeon GPU. Except for the certified drivers, the M5100 is more or less identical to the Radeon HD 8870M.

Architecture

The FirePro M5100 integrates 10 Compute Units based on the GCN architecture. Overall, the chip has 640 stream processors, 40 TMUs and 16 ROPs. The memory of up to 2 GB GDDR5 is connected via an 128-bit interface. Just like the Radeon series, the FirePro M5100 offers features like Eyefinity, Enduro or PCIe 3.0. Presumably, AMD uses the Cape Verde graphics chip, but this has not yet been officially confirmed.

Performance

According to the clock rates of up to 775 MHz for the chip and 1125 MHz for the memory (4500 MHz effective, 72 GB/s), the 3D gaming performance will be slightly above the Nvidia Quadro K2100M or GeForce GT 750M with GDDR5 memory. Recent Games of 2014/2015 can thus be played fluently in medium to high details and a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels.

Power Consumption

The FirePro M5100 features different energy saving techniques to reduce power consumption and prolong battery life. These include PowerPlay and PowerTune (for clocking the GPU), Zero Core (deactivates parts of the GPU when the display is off) and Enduro (dynamic GPU switching between the processor graphics and the dedicated Radeon GPU). The maximum power consumption under full load should be about 50 watts (estimate), making the card suitable for laptops 15 inches in size or greater.

AMD Radeon R9 M295X

The AMD Radeon R9 M295X is a mobile graphics card that first appeared in the 5K iMac Late 2014 as an upgrade to the Radeon R9 M290X in the base model. The M295X is based on the new Tonga chip and therfore used the third generation of the GCN architecture. The power consumption should be between 100 Watt (like the 780M) to 125 Watts (680MX).

Our gaming benchmarks in the 5K iMac position the M295X usually somewhere between a Geforce GTX 880M to 970M. For demanding games in 5K however, the performance is not enough.