HotHardware reviews ATI FireGL V5600, NVidia QuadroFX 1700, and ATI FireGL V3600 video cards
Just a few weeks ago, we took a look at the two fastest workstation class graphics cards currently on the market, the FireGL V8650 from ATI/AMD and the QuadroFX 5600 from Nvidia. We found both products to be quite powerful and thought either one would be a solid choice for a high-end workstation. However, the one comment which was repeated over and over again when looking at those cards was that unless you worked for a major studio or production firm, they were simply not very affordable. At nearly $3,000 a piece, the FireGL V8650 and QuadroFX 5600 require large investments. However, don't think that just because a graphics card is targeted for workstation use that it has to be over-the-top expensive.
While workstation cards are certainly more expensive than their gaming-class brethren, it's absolutely possible to build a budget-level system with a workstation-class graphics card to match. Both Nvidia and ATI have workstation-class cards which scale down well below $500, a fraction of the price of the high-end cards we looked at in our prior article. Today, we'll be looking at a few products which make up this new generation of relatively inexpensive workstation cards, and we'll see how performance compares to their high-end counterparts as well.
We'll be looking at three cards in particular - two from ATI and one from Nvidia. From ATI, we've got their new FireGL V5600 512 MB card along with their low-end FireGL V3600 256 MB card. In the Nvidia camp, we've got our hands on the popular QuadroFX 1700 512 MB card. All three of these cards are very tolerable in terms of size, power consumption, noise, and (most of all) price. While one shouldn't expect top of the line performance from these cards, in our tests we found performance in many applications to be impressively good, proving that you don't need to spend four digits to get solid workstation performance...
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