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Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 Pro Goodness

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Nvidia has launched the Quadro FX 4800 professional graphics card, featuring 192 processor cores and 1.5 GB of memory.

Nvidia has been hard at work lately pushing out new high-end products for the professional market; last month releasing the Tesla personal supercomputer, as well as the world’s first 4 GB graphics card. While not quite as exciting as those releases however, Nvidia has started off December with the launch of its new Quadro FX 4800 ultra-high-end professional graphics card. The new graphics card features 192 CUDA parallel processor cores, 1.5 GB of GDDR3 frame buffer memory and 76.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Designed for applications such as digital content creation and high-performance computational analysis, the Quadro FX 4800 seems to be the replacement for the aging Quadro FX 4600 graphics card, both of which are currently priced at $1,999. Loaded with 192 parallel processor cores though, the new Quadro FX 4800 has even more processor cores than the Quadro FX 5600, while having a lower price and requiring less power. According to benchmarks located on Nvidia’s website, the Quadro FX 5600 and Quadro FX 4800 perform identically.

Processor CoresMemory SizeMemory BandwidthMemory InterfacePower ConsumptionPrice
Quadro FX 58002404 GB102 GB/s512-bit189 W$3,499
Quadro FX 56001281.5 GB76.8 GB/s384-bit171 W$2,999
Quadro FX 48001921.5 GB76.8 GB/s384-bit150 W$1,999
Quadro FX 4600112768 GB67.2 GB/s384-bit134 W$1,999
Quadro FX 3700112512 MB51.2 GB/s256-bit78 W$799

The Quadro FX 4800 comes equipped with two DisplayPort connectors, a single Dual-Link DVI connector and has support for DirectX 10, OpenGL 3.0 and Shader Model 4.0. The card fills up the space of two slots, consumes 150-watt of power and assuming that a system can handle two of these cards, there is support for SLI frame rendering.

15 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jaragon13 04 December 2008 04:03
    What's the point of the Quadro 5600 then? Or is the data table wrong?
    Reply
  • ckthecerealkiller 04 December 2008 04:20
    jaragon13What's the point of the Quadro 5600 then? Or is the data table wrong?As far as I know the only dif is the 5600 has 2 dual link DVI ports. Whoopdie freakin do.
    Reply
  • NuclearShadow 04 December 2008 05:14
    What the heck is Nvidia thinking with the 5600? It has less Processor Cores than the 4800 and it requires more power! There is no excuse for it being priced that much higher no matter how many DL DVI ports it has.
    Reply
  • emp 04 December 2008 06:21
    Well at least now we know what happened with all the old GT200 192SP meant for GTX 260.
    Reply
  • 04 December 2008 09:39
    the point of the 5600 is that it's the old card, just like the 4800 replaced the 4600. the 5800 replaced the 5600
    Reply
  • Tindytim 04 December 2008 16:43
    I'd be interested in seeing someone get a few 5800's and switch them to the 280 GTX bios (their them same hardware other than one having more memory, and the different ports). Then seeing what sort of performance games they would get versus the normal hardware. But I don't know that many people that would do this normally, when going up the ladder of price, the performance increases decrease. So why not get a tri-SLI set-up with 12GB of ram?
    Reply
  • eodeo 04 December 2008 21:52
    5600= 8800 ultra (with more video ram)
    5800= gtx 280 (with more video ram)
    4800= gtx 260 (with more video ram)
    4600= 8800gtx (same memory, and shader count is the same @ 128 not 112 like the article says)
    3700=8800gt=9800gt

    only thing different between them are drivers and the price tag. be aware thaat you can find all cards save for gtx 280 with same/more memory than the quadro model has.
    Reply
  • antilycus 04 December 2008 23:32
    gamers donet need this. 3d rendering is much more intesnsive then your games. however, until someone makes a DLL or API or bakend to use the 192 as processors for computations this is useless to 3d rendering. BTW I cant see the chat window, so I apologize if there are typos
    Reply
  • wavebossa 05 December 2008 02:57
    I cant see the window either.. Oh well. eodeo, your are a fool, i'm sory to say. But those cards areNOT the same. At all They may look similar on the outside but they are made to specialize in certain apps. Quadro specializes in 3d rendering, and up until the 5800, they couldn't render a game worth shit. gtx is the opposite. It can run CAD but nowher closeto the level the 56000 does.
    Reply
  • wavebossa 05 December 2008 02:58
    See this is why we need the comment window back... I shoulda just typed it on word and copy paseted.
    Reply