14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA may not have covered the entire consumer segment in Fermi cards yet, but it seems to have moved significantly faster, or more suddenly, on the professional graphics market. Just a short while ago, it proudly announced the new Quadro Series of high-end adapters. Now, HP has decided to act upon its status as top PC supplier and be the first to implement the new technology in one of its EliteBook mobile workstations.
The device in question is known as the EliteBook 8740W and is a 17-inch notebook that spares no expense when it comes to performance. It has an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition central processing unit at its heart, and up to a solid 16GB of RAM to back it up. The machine even boasts a rugged, gunmetal aluminum chassis that confers resistance to vibration, humidity, altitude and extreme temperatures upon the laptop. As for video, the Quadro FX 5000M is the mobile graphics solution that HP chose to throw into the mix. It has 320 cores and a full 2GB of GDDR5 memory. In fact, it is just a slightly toned down version of the desktop card, which boasts 352 cores and 2.5GB GDDR5.
"For over a decade Quadro has been the choice of professionals around the world. We've also built Engines like AXE to enable the creation of next-gen applications," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. "When you couple these technologies with our Fermi architecture, the result is a new Quadro family that's exponentially better than anything the market has ever seen."
HP has not yet publicly stated when it expects to actually start shipping the EliteBook 8740W, so professional will still have to wait a while until they can have a taste of DirectX 11 mobile might. Still, HP at least unveiled the price, a quite massive $2.676.