NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 AGP 8X

CADalyst, Oct, 2004

NVIDIA

www.nvidia.com

Star rating: Not rated

Price: $1,300

When the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 was released in mid-2003, it immediately became one of the most popular graphics cards for CAD/CAM systems and has remained so to today. Because this graphics card has found a home in so many CAD/CAM workstations and many of you are familiar with its performance characteristics, I decided to include it in this roundup for comparison purposes, even though it's considered a high-end graphics card rather than a midrange one like those covered in this review.

Featuring 256MB of onboard RAM with a 256-bit memory interface, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 is an AGP 8X graphics card that has a graphics memory bandwidth of 27.2GB per second. It supports ultrahigh-resolution displays up to 3840X2400. Using both of its output connectors, it drives the new 9-megapixel displays such as those from ViewSonic and IBM (Cadalyst, April 2004, p. 28). The scores for the FX 3000 listed in the accompanying feature table are lower than typical for the Cadalyst Labs C2001 benchmark.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 also features parallel vertex engines, fully programmable pixel pipelines, and other workstation-specific features. It offers solid support for OpenGL and DirectX. The FX 3000 continues to be available from NVIDIA and provides excellent performance for those who will continue to use AGP-based systems for some time to come.