Testing an AMD WX 9100 eGPU with the 15-inch MacBook Pro i9 inside a Sonnet eGFX 650 Breakaway Box.
The WX 9100 is a high-end professional workstation card that supports ECC memory and is designed for large computing jobs or a large volume of them in a zero failure environment. To support this goal, the WX 9100 comes with 16GB of HBM2 memory, 4096 stream processors and is based on the latest 12n Vega architecture from AMD. For the outputs, the card has six Mini-DisplayPort 1.4 connections that support 10-bit output.
All these features are added to a graphics card with a cost of $ 1500 that will definitely seem high for the consumer market, now that BitCoin's restriction on prices has ended. But, for those who need that kind of computational weight, it's not a bad buy, even when you add the eGPU cabinet. We will compare the WX 9100 and Sonnet combo with the best graphics card available on our 15-inch MacBook Pro i9 2018, the 4GB Radeon Pro 560X. We will also connect that machine to the eGPU AMD 580 Pro Blackmagic that houses a Radeon Pro 580 graphics chip with 8 GB of memory.
We use the Set-eGPU script to force all applications to use the eGPU, but this should not be required with MacOS Mojave. Beginning with the OpenCL test of Geekbench 4, the WX 9100 obtained more than twice the internal graphics of MacBooks and a little more than the Blackmagic unit. By doing a quick benchmark test on the Unigine's Heaven benchmark, which tests the graphics performance of the games, the WX 9100 once again performs more than twice as much as the 560X and about 45% faster than the Blackmagic eGPU.
