Back at the launch of NVIDIA's G80 graphics processor, and more recently with the coverage of the company's Tesla product line, we've made mention that a big part of product strategy at the Santa Claran IHV centers around maximising investment in technology primarily designed for the consumer. Until Tesla launched, NVIDIA graphics chip investment spanned GeForce and Quadro, with the latter product line the one aimed at professional DCC, CAD/CAM, motion video production and other non gaming markets that require GPU acceleration. They been dominant, showing a rough one third share of the market with Quadro, more than four times the share AMD have with FireGL. - Hexus

NVIDIA Quadro FX5600 1.5GB Graphics Card Review

It's not too much of a stretch to imagine how the architectural properties of NVIDIA's flagship processor would translate to excellent performance in the professional market, especially as certain parts of the content creation software world transition to real time shader driver acceleration. With a unified shader architecture, raw vertex processing for G80 is potentially many times faster than G71, the chip that powered the outgoing high-end Quadro board. Pair that with big increases in raw fill and sampling rates and it's not hard to see why Quadro products powered by G80 understandably have the pro market excited.

Think of a GeForce 8800 GTX with double the memory and you are not far away from realising the specification of a Quadro FX5600 in terms of on-paper rendering performance. Obviously there is a bit more to the Quadro FX5600 than the frequencies of the GPU and the size of the framebuffer, though. There is no G80 based Quadro card that supports SDI connection to broadcast video systems, however, so you will have to wait for that if you are in the TV or film business for your real-time overlay and related systems and require features that the G80 chipset provides.

The Quadro FX5600 has frequencies of 600MHz for the base clock, an apparent 1400MHz for the hot shader clock and 1600MHz effective for the 1.5GB GDDR3 RAM devices. The base and hot clocks are higher than GeForce 8800 GTX, but the memory clock is less, resulting in 76.8GB/sec of peak on-board memory bandwidth between GPU and memory. NVIDIA state a power requirement of 171W, and we measure that to be reasonably accurate with a 182W peak load in our test system. You will also note a single SLI connector for the Quadro FX5600, used to pair with another.

At a healthy £2100 here at the time of writing, the Quadro FX5600 doesn't represent great value for money when considered against US dollar pricing of about $2700 for the thing at the current exchange rate. However consider it solely using UK pricing for the FireGL V7350 and it's clear that if you will make use of the GPU's inherent performance traits and the large framebuffer, you willl get price to performance that makes some good sense. The FireGL V7350 represents the next rung down in the memory-per-GPU ladder, which is what will make the Quadro FX5600 so attractive versus something like the FireGL V7350.

In short, while we only scratch the surface, we'll scratch much deeper in the future as we invest in our tests, and it's not too hard to see why NVIDIA G80 with 1.5GB of RAM with reasonable form factor and physical properties makes for an enticing professional level purchase in Quadro FX5600 form. If your business lies in manipulation of large datasets using the GPU, get your manager to sign that purchase order.