Nvidia Quadro FX 1700
The Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 is a classic mid-range product comparable to the ATI FireGL 5600, and is a good compromise between performance and power consumption. For users who deal primarily with wire grid models and technical plans, the FX 1700 offers sufficient performance at a price around $500.
Based on memory capacity alone, you can see that this model is not meant to deal with complex shading operations and textures, but it can easily do your basic bread and butter projects. Although Nvidia arms it with 512 MB, the memory type is only DDR2 with a 128-bit wide interface connection. Therefore, the Quadro FX 1700 only has a bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s. The chip used is the G84 at 80 nanometers, also found on the gaming counterpart GeForce 8600. The 3-pin virtual reality glasses port is nice; you won’t find that on the ATI FireGL V5600.