NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 PCI Express

CADalyst, Oct, 2004

NVIDIA

www.nvidia.com

Star rating: 5 stars out of 5

Price: $650-$700

NVIDIA recently added a new line of PCI Express card to its burgeoning graphics card offerings. This new line includes the NVIDIA Quadro FX 540, FX 1400, FX 4400, and FX 4400G. I tested the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400, which fit the midrange workstation graphics card criteria Cadalyst established for this roundup. The FX 4400 was not available at the time I was evaluating new graphics cards, but Cadalyst plans to review the card when it does become available. With its new line of PCI Express cards, NVIDIA wants to provide something for every type of PC user.

The FX 1400 has 128MB of DDR1 memory onboard, with a 256-bit memory interface. The graphics memory bandwidth for the FX 1400 is 19.2GB per second. Output connectors include two DVI-I connectors and a 3D stereo connector. The FX 1400 carries a three-year warranty.

NVIDIA's Quadro FX 1400 has parallel vertex engines and fully programmable pixel pipelines. It supports both OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX. The programmability of the vertex and pixel pipelines enables real-time shaders to simulate a wide range of physical effects and surface properties.

I tested the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 with a prerelease version of NVIDIA's unified driver v6.13.10.6600, still some weeks away from final release. The drivers were surprisingly solid and stable for beta drivers, even in this early release. A couple of components in the MAXBENCH4 suite ran more slowly than anticipated when used with NVIDIA's MAXtreme v6.00.07.00 driver, but I expect that once the drivers are finalized and optimized, they will offer even higher performance. This might also be expected of the other graphics cards tested with prerelease drivers.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 redefines our expectations of price and performance for midrange graphics cards. On the Cadalyst Labs C2001 benchmark test, the FX 1400 scored 130.67--comfortably within the range usually posted by high-end cards. Similarly, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 produced an averaged high/low score of 98.71 on the MAXBENCH 4 test. At 47.57, the scores on the proe-02 viewset of the SPECviewperf 7.1.1 benchmark were about average for the cards included in this roundup.

With an estimated street price of $650-$700 and great performance scores, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 is sure to be a popular graphics card that will find a home in many CAD/CAM systems.

Highly Recommended.