Allow me to introduce myself. My name is John
Fiegener. I am the Founder and Owner of tool.
Inc. We are a Product Design Group
specializing in mechanical design of products
mainly in the consumer market. I do much of
my work with the help of CAD applications and
powerful workstations driving the software.
An example of one of my more recognizable pieces,
would be the lock I helped design for the Kryptonite
Lock Company. You can thank me for
keeping that snazzy new Mountain Bike you have,
safe and sound. ;-)
At any rate, this type of advanced hardware and
software help us to conceive ideas in real time.
We have the capabilities to design and model
concepts on screen. We can then test these
concepts and apply real world situations to the
data models. Once the model is sufficient we can
then send the data out for a rapid prototype and
have a tangible concept in a day or two. The
ability to manipulate this data rapidly is very
important to the time frame of the development.
Improvements in CPU speed and graphic cards have
allowed for decreased time in getting a concept to
market.
In the last few months, Nvidia has released a
global assault on the professional workstation
video card arena. It was only a matter of time
before gaming cards and professional graphic cards
became one. When I first started using high end
CAD applications like Pro/Engineer it was on a
$28,000 Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 running Unix.
Today I do most of my work on an over clocked
Windows NT Athlon 900 that I paid $2,400 and it is
basically 10 times as fast as the SGI. If
someone had told me then, that this was to be the
future of CAD workstations, I would have
laughed.
Just as the GeForce has altered the stage of
the gaming card market so too has Elsa with its
release of the Gloria II, driven by the Nvidia
Quadro GPU processor. This
is a Hot Hardware look at the Elsa Gloria II
Quadro with 64MB of SDRAM unified memory on board.
Lets take a look at the specifications.
