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Graphics cards for every CAD user.
This special First Look roundup spans the range of workstation graphics card performance, from entry level to top end. The entry-level graphics card is a newly introduced ATI FireGL T2-128 card with 128MB of RAM. The top-end card is NVIDIA's FX 3000, which boasts 256MB of RAM. Both cards were tested on a state-of-the-art dual Opteron 64-bit CAD workstation from @Xi Computer.
There are several firsts with this roundup: The system based on dual AMD Opteron 1.8GHz 64-bit processors is the first that we've run through our benchmarks. This is also the first time we've fully tested under Microsoft Windows XP Professional.
As anticipated, performance figures were somewhat lower under Windows XP Professional than under Windows 2000, and some features of the XP operating system don't make for the easiest benchmark testing. Nevertheless, because XP Professional is installed on many new workstations, we test it here.
NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000
NVIDIA is not resting on its laurels -it continues to produce ever-faster workstation graphics cards. Coming on the heels of the speedy FX 2000, the new FX 3000 is even faster,
The fan on the FX 3000 is noisy, particularly when added to the five fans already operating inside the Xi 488/240 MTower 2P64 system we used for our benchmarks. One look at the FX 3000 with its extensive heat-dissipating fan structure makes you wonder how hot it gets inside the computer case, particularly with systems built around faster microprocessors that already generate a generous amount of heat. How far can computer and graphics card designs advance without using nitrogen cooling or some other form of air (and hopefully noise) conditioning?
NVIDIA announced two Quadro FX 3000 cards, the standard model benchmarked here and the FX 3000G. The latter model includes Framelock, which lets you link multiple systems in a cluster for life-sized visualization, and Genlock, which synchronizes with standard signal formats and house-sync signals for video postproduction, broadcast, compositing, and editing solutions.
Among the new features in the FX 3000 are high-performance graphics memory and 27.2GB-per-second memory bandwidth-more than twice the bandwidth of the FX 2000 card. Also new is a single system powerwall so you can specify overlap and blending...