Nvidia introduces two very expensive workstation graphics cards
Are you a CAD or raytracing professional with several thousand dollars to burn? If so then Nvidia has two brand new Quadro cards for you. The new Quadro FX 4600 and 5600 are not only faster than their predecessors, but also have more on-board memory. The 4600 sports 768 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 384-bit bandwidth and 57.6 GB/sec. The 5600 is even more powerful and has 1.5 GB of memory running at 76.8 GB/sec.
As you would expect both cards use quite a bit of power and the 4600 gulps 96 watts of electricity while the 5600 chugs down 171 watts. But in return for that power, you get 250 million triangles per second from the 4600 and 300 million on the 5600.
Nvidia also launched an updated model in their Quadro VCS line of external workstation rigs. No specifications of Model IV were released, but presumably it would be more powerful than the dual Quadro FX 5500 boards and 2 GB of frame buffer memory in Model III.
All of this graphics power will only set you back a few thousand dollars. The Quadro FX 4600 retails for $2000 while the 5600 sells for one thousand more at $3000.
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Humphrey Cheung was a senior editor at Tom's Hardware, covering a range of topics on computing and consumer electronics. You can find more of his work in many major publications, including CNN and FOX, to name a few.