Nvidia Goes Quadro Integrated

Nvidia has announced two new professional graphics solutions; the Nvidia Quadro FX 370 Low Profile GPU and the Quadro FX 470 integrated motherboard GPU.

Attempting to further capture market share in the professional graphics segment, Nvidia’s newest professional graphics solutions take on the entry-level GPU and integrated motherboard GPU market. The newly announced Nvidia Quadro FX 370 Low Profile (LP) graphics card is an entry-level professional graphics board that has been designed for use in small form factor systems and features a fanless cooling solution. The also newly announced Nvidia Quardo FX 470 integrated chipset features the first ever integrated professional motherboard GPU, offering professional graphics in an affordable and all-new way.

The Nvidia Quadro FX 370 LP and the Nvidia Quadro FX 470 are certified for key DCC and CAD applications, such as Autodesk and Adobe. Both graphics solutions feature a 128-bit precision graphics pipeline, 32-bit floating point precision, filtering and blending, advanced color compression and full-scene anti-aliasing. In particular, the Nvidia Quadro FX 370 LP features 8 CUDA parallel processing cores, 256 MB of total memory, an 8 GB/sec. memory bandwidth, a 25 W maximum power consumption and has support for DirectX 10. Now available, the Nvidia Quadro FX 370 LP has a MSRP of $149. For some comparison, the ATI FirePro V3700 256 MB workstation video card is currently available for $89.99 from Newegg.com.

The Nvidia Quadro FX 470 integrated chipset supports Intel’s Socket LGA775 processors, FSB speeds of 1333 MHz and offers a single Dual-Link DVI. The integrated GPU features 16 CUDA parallel processing cores, a 128-bit memory interface, a 12.8 GB/sec. memory bandwidth and it can use up to 4 GB of DDR2 system memory. Also, noise is rated at 24 dB, maximum power consumption reaches 30 W and DirectX 10 is supported. The Nvidia Quadro FX 470 will be available from Nvidia system integrator partners and systems featuring the integrated GPU are expected to reach under $700. Asus has already announced its TW100-E5 iQuadro workstation, which features the new Nvidia Quadro FX 470 GPU.

On a side note, Intel is expected to release its Larrabee GPU for the high-end workstation market in the second-half of 2009, threatening Nvidia’s current hold on the market. It should be interesting to see how this, combined with ATI’s efforts to also steal market share, affects the entry-level market.

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