Selecting a display adapter was among the greatest challenges this year. We could have simply updated last year's Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 trifecta with three GTX 580s, but where's the fun in that?
To be different, we contacted ATI ... uh ... we mean AMD, and learned that we already had custody of their highest-end pixel pumper, the Radeon HD5870, a board that's also ready to display 3-D, the company said. But we're not satisfied that 3-D specifications are settled, so we decided to wait until a single standard emerged before we started calling one Ultimate.
Another board that caught our attention was the Quadro 2000, a board released in October by Nvidia that's aimed at the business user doing computer-aided design work. Listing for $US599, the Quadro 2000 exceeds its Quadro 1800 predecessor in performance by hundreds of times, according to some measures.
And its 192 CUDA processor cores delivered adequate performance for gaming, making the card a good all-around choice for pros and hobbyists alike.
We tested the Quadro 2000's gaming prowess in October using our standard fixture, the Asus Crosshair IV motherboard with AMD Phenom II X6 processor and 4-GB DDR 3 memory with vertical sync forced off.
A maximum frame rate of 414 was displayed by Fraps 3.2.2 when playing Codemasters Software's Dirt 2 driving game with resolution set to 1,440 x 900. Average frame rate during game play was about 105 fps. The Quadro gets all the power it needs from the bus; it requires no additional cable from the power supply.
Since it uses less power, it naturally runs cool, and lets out its high of 132 degrees Fahrenheit into the PC cabinet. Since there's no rear-panel vent, it uses just a single slot at the rear.
The Quadro 2000 really performs when doing CAD work. Using Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.'s Viewperf 11, testers found the greatest improvements when handling scientific visualisation workloads. The 2000 delivered an Ensight score of 20.87, a 1,797 percent gain over the 1800's score of 1.1.
In the Maya test, which measures state changes when rendering models with millions of verticies, the 2000 improved by 735 percent, scoring 49.59 compared with the 1800's 5.94. We also tested the Quadro 2000 with Viewperf 11 when running in the Ultimate PC with similar results. The Nvidia Quadro 2000 has a street price of $US449.
NEXT: Power Supply
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
