Budget workstation workhorse—no extra power needed
Raw horsepower is often the most important factor when it comes to workstation graphics cards, but it’s not the only factor worth considering. Power, size, heat output, and price are all key considerations as well. While the AMD Radeon Pro W7500 isn’t the fastest option around, it excels in all of these other areas. At $429, the W7500 is one of the least expensive current workstation cards on the market. This tantalizing price along with its other attributes make it an alluring option for those who need workstation performance on a budget.Design: A Workstation Radeon RX 7600—No Extra Power Needed
The Radeon Pro W7500 is based on the AMD Navi 33 GPU die, which is the same GPU core used inside the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and the Radeon Pro W7600. In total, this GPU has 2,048 streaming processors, 128 TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), 64 ROPs (Raster Operation Processors), 64 AI accelerators, and 32 ray accelerators, all of which are active and available on both the Radeon RX 7600 and the Radeon Pro W7600.
Of course, the Radeon Pro W7500 ships with some of these resources disabled, dropping its core count down slightly to 1,792 streaming processors, 112 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 56 AI accelerators, and 28 ray accelerators. Clock speed is also reduced compared with the Radeon RX 7600 and the Radeon Pro W7600, with the Radeon Pro W7500 coming clocked at 1,500MHz with a boost clock of 1,700MHz.
The memory interface has been kept the same on all three of these cards, but the Radeon Pro W7500 still comes up a bit short here compared with the Radeon Pro W7600 and the Radeon RX 7600. All three cards were designed with a 128-bit connection to 8GB of GDDR6 video RAM. The speed at which the Radeon Pro W7500’s RAM operates is significantly lower than its counterparts, however, giving it peak memory bandwidth of just 172GB per second compared with the Radeon Pro W7600’s peak bandwidth of 288GB per second.
These reductions in hardware resources, clock speed, and bandwidth are certain to hamper the Radeon Pro W7500’s performance and push it well below the Radeon Pro W7600. We’ve found some advantages to this situation, however, as this also pushes down power consumption, which in term reduces heat production. This enabled AMD to create the Radeon Pro W7500 without a PCIe power connector, as it’s simply unnecessary. The card is able to draw all the power it needs from the motherboard’s PCIe slot.
This allowed AMD to reduce the length of the Radeon Pro W7500 to just 8.5 inches rather than the 9.5 inches of the Radeon Pro W7600. This difference doesn’t change much in all truth, but does help to cut costs some and may be advantageous in some cramped PC cases.
Other than that, the Radeon Pro W7500 is overall quite similar to the Radeon Pro W7600, with a single-slot thermal solution with just one fan. The Radeon Pro W7500 also has four DisplayPort 2.1 ports on its rear I/O panel with support for a single 8K monitor or two high refresh-rate 4K displays. AV1 encoding and decoding support is also built-in, along with 12-bit display color output support for content creation purposes.Test Setup and Spec Comparison
The system I used to test the Radeon Pro W7500 was our current GPU test bed that was first assembled in 2022.
