Nvidia Quadro FX 5800: the $3500 video card

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Home Money

2:45 PM on 11.10.2008, Dale North

49 comments | 11148 views

Nvidia Quadro FX 5800: the $3500 video card photo

#Money #PC

You hear it all the time: My PC can't run that! But the guy who picks up this new card probably won't ever have that problem.

Nvidia's Quadro FX 5800 is a beast, packing up to 240 of their CUDA graphics cores on on one massive card. How does 4GB of on-board graphics memory sound? I think it sounds f*cking insane! The only thing more insane is the price: $3499.

With a memory bandwidth of 102 GB per second, and fill rates that exceed 52 billion textels and 300 million triangles per second, this PCI Express device would make a kickass gaming card. It's actually intended to be used in the medical and scientific fields, though.

The card supports OpenGL and DirectX 10, so I wonder if you could really game with it.

LAUNCH GALLERY (4 IMAGES)

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48 comments | showing # 1 to 48

CelicaCrazed

So this will bring about the machine uprising??

harrmonica

still can't run crysis on max :p

Niero

I wonder if buying a $500 budget Dell with a good power supply and putting that thing in it runs better than paying $4000 for a top of the line Alienware, etc.

SOMEONE MUST FIND OUT!

Surf314

It's actually intended to be used in the medical and scientific fields, though.

That explains why there is no half naked chick on it.

scsitransfer

The card could run them but nVidia wouldn't release drivers for games like they do with their other cards, the drivers are written completely different for a workforce GPU

Demtor

Overkill = bonus points

king3vbo

Hear that?

That's the sound of me fapping to this card

Namelessted

you wouldn't get very good framerate on any high end games. The card is designed for a workstation, not a gaming machine. If some rich idiot bought this to play games, they deserve the shitty performance that they get out of it.

JamnOnTheOne

Those cards are awful for games.

Anything that has drivers not explicitly tailored for gaming is crap (remember Matrox?). I'm willing to be that the specialized OpenGL performance of the card is absolutely amazing though for imaging and rendering, hence the graphical application only.

jellydoodle

It is pointless, its a GTX280 with more memory, so it will run games the same as the GTX280...it's for other more specialised uses

insomnia

Yah Namelessted is right, this card isn't designed for games at all, a consumer videocard will blow it away for games...

Narishma

This card is actually very bad for gaming. Also the only difference between it and the GTX280 (wich too has 240 cores and costs like $400) is that it has 4GB of VRAM instead of 1GB...

Trevor McGee

I would commission nVidia to build me one of these specifically for gaming if I were a rich som' bitch.

I want a computer that can run like six Crysis' at full settings at the same time windowed. Why? Because my penis isn't big enough for my liking and I'd like to compensate by purchasing an overpowered machine that probably won't even have a quarter of it's potential tapped into.

:P

lhagen

I just bought six.

Timmeh

I think you'd be in for a disappointment if you tried to run games on a Quadro card. They aren't built for it, nor is it supported in drivers as scsi says.

Mxyzptlk

Does it come with an on-board flux capacitor?

Dexter345

Even though it's not meant for gaming, I think this is pretty good evidence as to why console gaming is king these days.

Satsumomo

That doesn't make sense Dexter. It's like saying automobiles are king today because hot dogs are overpriced.

"Even though it's not meant for gaming" <-- Key phrase.

Aberrant Thought

Hmmm...

I wonder how many Sterlings would require fellatio before I can get that for free.

Kasmodiah

"I wonder if buying a $500 budget Dell with a good power supply and putting that thing in it runs better than paying $4000 for a top of the line Alienware, etc.

SOMEONE MUST FIND OUT!"

I agree. Someone test this thing on all new games and post results.

BTW, I'm not gonna buy it, lol. Just curios.

Jon2309

Imagine a quad sli system. Sheesh. Might even play Doom!

smoger

Dexter345 = most flawed logic ever

Brilliam

For that amount of money, you think they could've made it a little more gaudy... yawn. This thing looks downright businesslike. Get some bling on that!

exodus1925

and we can win it how? Please say you have one to give away :(

Timmeh

@Dexter: Ho ho, you gotta be trolling there. Only a total idiot would make that statement with any seriousness. TOTAL idiot.

Kaspar

Wow, I just HAVE to get 2 of those, to replace my other videocards from Mars.

Clbull

But can it run Crysis?

mix

Who the HELL needs to see 300 million triangles per second, can the human even process that amount of triangles?......Why wouldn't you want to play video games on it?

Before $3500

After $3500

x 85,000

All I'm saying is that is a SHIT load of cash...my $250 GPU card works pretty damn well with todays game.

ajaxender

Hmm... makes me wonder how fast that thing could ray-trace... perhaps its gaming potential is not as low as we think! Give it a go on that quake 3 or 4 mod that guy was making, see if its playable yet.

John B

Please. This is like owning the fastest street-legal car in the world, but you have to be of royal blood to drive it and the fuel is only available in Scandinavia.

Holiday

You want amazingly real graphics with no lag? Go...Outside.

Edge of Blade

Let's point that at an open world game. Instead of Grand Theft Auto in Liberty City, that would take a whole damn country...

The Grudge

YARR! Smash Dexter!!! Haha, kidding aside. Although it seems to be impressive in concept this video card is over priced correctly for the medical biniz. I could use the money to make a righteous rig and still have enough to rent a stripper and do blow off her ass.

Velt

Is for 3d aplications and renders, not gaming.
Actually I know some people in the 3d business that work on normal video cards (gaming video cards), like the GTX280 and say is most of the time the same thing.

PhazonYoshi

Somebody must create the drivers for gaming, now :D

StressedOutCat

Ive tried expensive Nvidia quadro cards before and also ATI FireGL cards... none of these are any good for gaming most cases they do not even come close to the mid-range or the cheap end cards.. the way the GPU works on this card and the drivers are used is totally different than the gaming version cards.

scsitransfer

@Holiday

Unless you're drunk, then it still lags.

Wedge

The only thing this shows is the difference between consumer and business products is often a massive price point. It's funny because products with business and consumer variants generally have marginally different performance/usefulness and the only real reason to get one over the other is because of different licenses (which doesn't generally apply to hardware).

I just think it'd be interesting to see how this stacks up against a SLI set of the most expensive consumer model in 3D modelling/simulation apps... though I don't know if the RAM stacks on SLI...

JamnOnTheOne

@Wedge

It wouldn't be a fair contest. The tailor made card for imaging will blow the doors off of consumer model cards.

As someone that has worked in the computer imaging field in a previous development job, consumer level products can't hack it. It's funny, even recently some of those high powered specialty video cards can't run Diablo 2 because they don't have the right drivers for Direct X/3D compatibility.

moshakirby

@scsitransfer

And don't even get me started on the sprites! Those clouds don't look at all realistic.

Doesn't drinking just add motion blur? Man I wish there was a website about getting the best out of your system in "Life".
The "drinking adds motion blur" tip would be right up there in the top 10 best i think.

scsitransfer

@moshakirby

I prefer motion blur that doesn't backfire into crazy headaches when i wake up the next morning.

Knyte

You want to make it work for gaming?

Flash the BIOS with a GXT 280 BIOS.
Then tweak the drivers to see all 4GBs of RAM.

And, Voilla! You now have a $3500 GTX 280.

That would perform just as well as the $600 one.

Unless you are running a monitor that can do 4320p (7680x4320 Resolution.) You're not going to see the RAM make much of a difference. 1GB can handle just about all the textures a resonable monitor can display at its max resolution.

poonster

seriously who would buy a $3500 video card? the average gamer could never afford that,it's ridiculous.

MetalSlug

Haha my computer would explode if I even tried installing this.

Burnt Meatloaf

Most of that $3500 goes towards developing and supporting the ultra-high end drivers and plugins needed for workstation-class applications. The hardware itself isn't much more evolved than regular video cards.

Maya isn't exactly just a high-end version of the Doom3 engine.

cryocide

Pro tip: You're gonna need a 64-bit OS for this one. The 4GB addressable memory limitation on Windows -includes- RAM for peripherals such as your video card.

Pixelated

The "240 CUDA processing cores" is an Nvidia gimmick. Those 240 CUDA cores are nothing more than Stream Processors and not processing cores in the CPU sense of the word.

So according to Nvidia the ATI 4870 has 800 processing Cores!

I agree that this is nothing but a GTX 280 with 4GB VRAM and some driver tweaks that unlock the Quadro features. After all Nvidia doesn't want you to buy a $400 card and use it for gaming and CAD. They want you to buy a GTX280 for gaming and one of these rip-offs for $3500 to use for graphics design.

The Amazing Shenazin

3499 for a graphics card or 400 for a console? hmmmmmm

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