The latest addition to the NVIDIA Quadro graphics-card family is the new QUADRO FX 3000 for high-end digital animation and professional video solutions. With relatively good graphic cards now costing under $500, should you pay almost $2300 for the new FX 3000? The answer depends upon the power you need’and the size of your budget.
I installed the QUADRO FX 3000, with the drivers and software support, on our HP Workstation XW 4100. Though the installation was easy, the FX 3000 was so large that it covered one of my PCI slots. To test the card, I used Adobe Photoshop 7, Discreet 3ds max 5.1, and Avid Xpress Pro. That’s when I experienced the power and speed of the FX 3000. This new card brings us a few steps closer to real-time displays of interactive image manipulation, effects and previews of sophisticated texturing and animation.
The heart of the FX 3000 is NVIDIA’s NV35GL GPU, which comes with a 256-bit memory bus, increasing the memory bandwidth to 27.2 GB per second
The Good News: The QUADRO FX 3000 has application-specific certified drivers, which allow you to modify the card to meet the needs of your application. I was also impressed by the cooling system for this monster card. Even when I was using heavy-duty scenes of max, I could barely hear the noise.’
The Wish List: Lower the price, please!!!
The Bottom Line: If you need real horsepower for your projects, then you should consider NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 3000.
Web Address: www.nvidia.com
Animation Magazine’s Seal of Excellence
Ease of Installation and reliability: *****
Speed of Real-Time
Rendering Power: *****
Quality of Real-Time
Rendering: ****
Final Score: *****
