14 DAY TRIAL // Apart from the general consumer market segment, there is the professional market which demands a lot more performance from its dedicated hardware components, but which - luckily for manufacturing companies - is also more inclined to spend a little extra for that computing power increase. When talking about professional graphics cards, we are talking about AMD's Fire GL series or about Nvidia's Quadro family of products and Leadtek Research just announced the launch of a whole line of such cards. Leadtek Research meets the demands of the professional market segment with a new line of Qadro graphics cards, which are available for just about every budget, from the entry level FX 370 and 570, to the FX 1700 for the mainstream and to the NVS 290 and Tesla C870 which go for the high product range.
The latest Quadro graphics processing units from Nvidia come with some innovative technologies like the unified architecture which makes deployment easier as all new drivers will also be compatible with the older hardware components. Other innovations, like the dynamically allocated geometry, shading, pixel, and computer processing power, alongside the capability to process and transfer large textures needed by the latest 3D applications. Thanks to the internal hardware makeup of the new Quadro graphics processing units that integrates a crossbar memory architecture, they can achieve new record-breaking performance marks when it comes to occlusion culling, lossless depth Z-buffer, and color compression.
All new Quadro GPUs are fully compliant with the technical specifications of the DirectX 10.0 API and they also include support for Shader Model 4.0 which makes them valuable tools that will ''shorten the production process and enable faster time to market'', according to Leadtek Research's press release. The entry level cards from Leadtek Research are based on the Nvidia Quadro FX 370 and 570 graphics processing unit and they come with a 256MB DDR2 frame buffer and a memory access interface 64-bit wide. Both of the two entry-level products are using the PCI Express x16 system bus for faster access and they provide Dual DVI-I display connectors and active cooling solutions. Unlike most new generation graphics processing units, the FX 370 and FX 570 come with a low energy footprint of only 38W.
The Nvidia Quadro NVS 290 is designed to provide business and office workstations with a reliable hardware platform, which is the first step toward a stable working environment. As this card features support for Microsoft Windows Vista Premium, it is especially well suited for industry-leading business applications.
The new middle level product offering from Leadtek is the FX 1700 which sports 512MB of DDR2 dedicated video memory connected with the graphics processing units through a 128-bit wide interface that allows data transferring speeds of 12.8GB per second. This card too comes with an active cooling solution and it has a somewhat larger energy footprint of 42W, while using the PCI Express x16 interface for system connection.