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This professional
cards come with little goodies. For the price you pay for
these cards, it would be nice to get a few perks such as some
use full bundled software or a game preview, flattering the power of
the new technology. But no, in the high end workstation card
arena, you get the card the drivers and that's about it.
Click for full
view
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Drivers and Utilities |
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Detonator 40 |
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The card installed on
multiple machines with out a hitch. The CD provided by
PNY made the driver installation simple and painless.
The card came in the PNY box with the drivers on CD and
the adapter dongle that allows users with traditional CRT's
to use the card. The card can support 2 flat panel
monitors via the new "nView" technology developed by
Nvidia. We used the old work horse of the industry, the
standard 21" cathode-ray tube. I must say that I
found the additional 2" dongle connected to my CPU
a little annoying. Having the cable come into the box
perpendicular already makes it an object that is subject to occasional impact.
Now add 2 more inches and it becomes a
much larger target. I'm also one of
those guys who is in and out of his case so much that I rarely
screw down the connector screws. That's not the case with
this dongle. You have to screw it in or any small impact
or shake from moving your chair, can cause your screen to go black.
We won't moan too much here however, because the upside is
dual DVI output, which will be a real plus for some folks.
The drivers that were
supplied were a little older than the current drivers
available from Nvidia, so we downloaded the latest drivers from
them directly. Versus a consumer card, the driver
control panels don't differ much in the Quadro 4 line.
Regardless, we took a couple screen captures as a
refresher.
The 900 XGL
allows for the traditional application customization. I
ran the Pro/E test using the default and the Pro setting
and saw no change on the test results, SPECviewperf or
the Ocus Bench. The Detonator 40 drivers provides
antialiasing via a control panel option, as well as
setting up your nView desktop management options and display type.
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The
Test Setup |
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Let's role |
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Mid Tower
ATX Case w/ 400W PS, Pentium 4 1.6GHz (Provided By OutsideLoop
Computers) over clocked
to 2.4GHz, ASUS P4B533 P4 DDR
Motherboard, 512MB of Mushkin 2100 DDR, Seagate 40
GB 7200 RPMHD, PNY Quadro 4 900XGL, Asus 52X
CDROM, Windows XP, Detonator 40 Drivers
The
Test Applications
The
test bed consisted of 4 cards running through the same
grueling graphic and CPU intensive exercises, provided by
two respected agencies. SPEC provided Viewperf 7.0 as
well as the SPECapc Benchmark for Solidworks 2001 plus.
The Pro/ENGINEER testing was done with use of the OCUS
Bench. Olaf Corton has been producing a very reliable
Pro/E bench marks since the mid 90's. His test have
become the standard in the community as a reliable way of
testing systems with a variety of Pro functions
both simple and complex.
Although SPEC does
produce a Pro/E benchmark, we find the SPEC test to be
more time consuming than necessary. The Ocus bench gives
a straight look at performance of your machine running
some basic tasks. Olaf has also recently expanded his benchmark to
include new features of Pro and increased the intensity
of the test on both the CPU and graphics.
| Card |
Memory |
Drivers |
| PNY
Quadro 4 900 XGL |
128MB DDR |
Detonator 40 |
| 3D
Labs GVX1 |
32MB
SDR |
2.16-0849 |
| Elsa
Gloria II (Quadro) |
64MB DDR |
Detonator 40 |
| Leadtek
Geforce 2 Ultra w/ SoftQuadro |
64MB DDR |
Detonator 40 |
Note
that the Leadtek is enhanced through the use of the
Softquadro driver patch that I obtained from www.nvworld.ru.
This patch allows the user of Geforce II to modify
the driver to allow the Geforce to act as if it was a
Quadro. Go to nvworld.com to find out more.
SPECViewperf 7.0 Testing
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