 |
|
A
Closer Look At The NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 |
|
NV30GL Targeted Toward The High End |
|
NVIDIA's Quadro
FX 2000 carries much the same design as a standard GeForce
FX 5900/5800 card. The heat sink has a radial fin
design with a "turbine" like fan embedded at one end.
The fan circulates air out over the fins of the main
heat-sink and then outward toward the cooling fins of the
heat sinks for its 256MB of DDR2 DRAM, that is on board.
Click
to Enlarge
Dual
DVI
|
Heat
Sink
|
External Power
|
Which brings us
to a key difference between this product and NVIDIA's
upcoming Quadro FX 3000 product. The NV30GL core, like
the Consumer NV30 product, has a 128 bit DDR2 memory
controller on board and drives performance through a
narrower bus width but with a fairly robust overall clock
speed of 800MHz DDR. The upcoming NV35GL based Quadro
FX 3000 posses a 256 bit memory bus architecture, supporting
standard DDR DRAM at 850MHz. The relative performance
between these two cards should be an interesting case study
but memory bandwidth may or may not be a limiting factor for
Professional CAD and DCC application performance. We
have the Quadro FX 3000 in the lab at this very moment
actually and will be showing you how it performs comparably
in the weeks ahead. So stay tuned!
|
|
|
A
Closer Look At The ATi FireGL X1 |
|
The R300 Refined |
|
Like the Quadro
FX 2000, the ATi FireGL X1 is an absolute clone of its
consumer grade counterpart. The only difference, at
least on the surface, between the FireGL X1 and a Radeon
9700 Pro, is its dual DVI output and the DVI mezzanine card
that is attached to the feature connector header on the top
side of the board.
Click
to Enlarge
Dual
DVI
|
Heat
Sink
|
DVI
Mezz Card
|
As you can see,
the external power connector (top right of middle shot) is
the same, as well as the heat-sink that is used on top of
the VPU. Additionally, ATi designed this card with the
same 350MHz (700MHz DDR) Samsung chips for its 128MB of on
board memory. Which then leads us to a key
differentiator between the two contenders here in our
showcase. The ATi FireGL X1 has a 256 bit memory
interface and as we mentioned earlier, NVIDIA's Quadro FX
2000 has a 128 bit memory interface. However, while
the QFX 2000 runs DDR2 memory at 800MHz, the FGL X1 runs
standard DDR DRAM at 620MHz. The raw memory bandwidth
figures equate to 12.8GB/sec for the QFX 2000 and 19.8GB/sec
for the FGL X1. Our next match-up and follow-on
article, is an ATi FireGL X2-256 versus NVIDIA Quadro FX
3000 head to head showcase. Here both cards will be
sporting 256 bit memory interfaces at 850MHz for the Quadro
FX 3K and 620MHz again for the FireGL X2. Stay tuned
to HotHardware for further details. For now, we'll
look at these two current generation cards and show you what
they are both made of, beyond the hardware level.
Drivers And Test Setup
|
