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Quadro as gaming card?

C

Cold Dog

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 12, 2000
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I have a bud who recently bought a surplus Dell Precision Work Station. It came with dual Xeon 2.4's, 2 gigs of PC2100 Micron Ram and a Quadro FX 1000.

He intends to do some audio/visual work (Music CD/DVD burning, Photoshop, etc) and probably a little gaming on it and we were both wondering about the Quadro because I've never dealt with them before...

1. Is it any good for gaming?

2. Would he be better off Ebaying it and getting say, a 6800 GT or Ultra?

3. What do Quadro's do so well that make them so expensive?

TIA
 
it will probobly run slower than the geforce counterpart. i dont know off hand what the geforce equivalent is but i think its around a geforce fx 5600 or so...

i had a quadro 2 pro in my system and i used it as a gaming card. it was about 5-10% slower than a geforce 2 pro in games but 50% faster in cad.
 
They excel in 3d apps like Maya and Max and also CAD apps. The difference lies as much in the drivers as in the hardware with quadros and Ati's fireGLs. At work I'm using the quadro 750xgl, which is a step down from what your bud's machine has, and it tears through scenes with alot of polygons with high res animated textures and plays back fully rigged characters smoothly. So that's where it shines.

As for games...rtcw and rtcw:ET played well enough (both openGL games), but Farcry (dx9 game) didn't play so hot. In theory doom3 would run pretty good, but I havn't tried so I'm not sure.

They're expensive in part because of the market in considerably smaller compared to gaming cards. 50 gaming cards are probably sold to every one DCC card sold.

So in conclusion, yes you can game ok on them (newer games, not so much) and you'll not see a 2d benefit over a regular gaming card. Their cost seems high because they're not aimed at regular consumers.
 
I wouldn't use it as my primary gaming rig, but I wouldn't worry to much about playing the occassional game during my lunch break, either.
 
I'm using a loaner Quadro 700 GXL or something like that. My GeForce 2 Ultra recently died and I wanted something to hold me over until I can get a good deal on a 6600GT or something. It's don't everything I've asked of it, but I'm not a huge gamer. I've gone thru the D3 demo, the Far Cry Demo and now I'm playing Painkiller. Frame rates have been just fine with me. FWIW
 
Had a quadro2 Pro for almost 2 years, and it was great. If your game has OpenGL mode, use it. Quadro cards suffer with DirectX due to its drivers, but they really shin in OpenGL applications.
I used it for Counter-Strike and the FPS I got was unmatched even when I replaced it with a GeForce FX5600 card.
Had a chance to test a Quadro FX1000 and my 3DMark score was off the chart. Wish I could keep it.
 
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