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A
Closer Look At The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 |
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NV35GL Money Shots |
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The Quadro FX
3000 is a beast of a card, sporting a serious cooling
package on both the back and front sides of the PCB.
The heat sink is very similar to NVIDIA's reference design
on the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. The turbine fan design
on this card, thankfully is as quiet as well. The fan
actually runs at about half speed while idle, running just
in a desktop environment. However, fire up a 3D design
application and the fan kicks up a notch or two, creating an
audible but completely tolerable low level whine. If
you've heard a stock GeForce FX 5900 fan, it sounds much the
same.
Click
to Enlarge
Dual
DVI
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Heat
Sink
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External Power
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Dual Silicon
Image "PanelLink DVI" Transmitters provide the interfaces
off the front side of the card, along with a stereo
connector for stereoscopic 3D glasses. High quality 3D
Stereoscopic Shutter Eye Glass technology is sometimes used
for adding depth and realism when displaying in certain CAD
or DCC applications. On the back end of the card, there is
a 4-pin Molex type connector, for a required external power
connection. NVIDIA designs and manufactures these
cards themselves, as they do with the other members of the
Quadro FX line-up. Speaking of the line-up, here's a
quick take on that, from a recent briefing NVIDIA gave us on
the entire product line.
Click
Images For Full View
Quadro FX
3000G
As you can see,
there are a number of price points covered in the line-up
and at the top is the Quadro FX 3000G (pictured to the
right). This is an enhanced version of the QFX3K, with
a daughter card that sits on top of the board, mezzanine
style. This board provides such functionalities as "Framesynch"
multi-system synchronization and "Genlock" for
synchronization to an external source input. The
Framesynch connections are the sockets that look similar to
Ethernet jacks. These provide the ability to have
multiple systems working on a single model and rendering
contiguous pieces of it, for example, while displayed at the
same time on a larger screen format. The Genlock
connector is the coaxial plug on the card. However,
we're looking at the standard version of the Quadro FX 3000
here for our test purposes, so that's what we'll be focusing
on in this showcase.
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NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 Driver Suite |
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Unified Driver Architecture - Feature Rich And
Stable |
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We've covered
NVIDIA's driver control panels and features in our recent
Quadro FX 2000 article, so we won't go to deeply into them
here. However, we'll present you with our standard
control panel screen shot "nickel tour" and take it from
there.
Driver
Control Panels
Click to Enlarge
Info
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Clock
Speed
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Image Quality
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Direct 3D
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OpenGL
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NV Rotate
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exception of application specific OpenGL and Direct 3D
driver optimization drop down selection boxes, NVIDIA's Pro
Graphics drivers have the same look, feel and functionality
as their consumer products. These drivers are
extremely stable and we didn't experience even the slightest
hiccup in our testing on various i875 based Pentium 4 test
beds. Image quality settings are abundant in these
drivers, just as they are in the consumer product.
However, users can enable various levels of Anti-Aliasing
all the way up to 16X, while the consumer product tops out
at 8X. Anisotropic Filtering settings are available up
to 8X as well. Additionally, NV Rotate provides screen
layout positioning for engineers that work in different
horizontal or vertical formats.
SPECapc For
SolidWorks 2003 And 3D Studio Max 4.2 Testing
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