DailyTech - NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 X2 Officially Announced

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Hardware NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 X2 Officially Announced
Brandon Hill (Blog) - April 25, 2006 1:05 AM

14 comment(s) - last by rushfan2006.. on Apr 25 at 2:17 PM

Predicted, leaked and confirmed

Just yesterday, we brought you a story about a leaked PDF file discussing NVIDIA's Quadro FX 4500 X2 graphics card. As expected, NVIDIA today officially announced the card which as its name implies features two Quadro FX 4500 graphics adapters.

NVIDIA touts the superior performance of these cards in many vital industries including Oil and Gas, Broadcast and Film, Visualization and Simulation, and Medical Imaging. In fact, NVIDIA claims that its professional Quadro products account for 80% of professional graphic card sales.

Now that the Quadro family has moved up to dual GPU-on-PCB, quad Quadro configurations are not far off. The GeForce 7800GTX and 7900GTX families have pushed the envelop in this department with an appearance from Dell and Alienware several weeks ago.

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hmm

By MMilitia on 4/25/2006 7:57:50 AM , Rating: 2

What are these used for in the oil and gas industry?

I thought they where primarly CGI workhorses.

RE: hmm

By Filibuster on 4/25/2006 8:06:17 AM , Rating: 2

They're used as an excuse to raise gas prices. ;P

I imagine there is a lot of 3d modeling used when drilling holes that go down very deep, but honestly I'm not sure.

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RE: hmm

By MMilitia on 4/25/2006 9:41:13 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah I suppose they use alot of CAD.

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RE: hmm

By PuravSanghani on 4/25/2006 11:16:26 AM , Rating: 2

These cards are used not just for CAD applications, but also for digital content creation such as 3D modeling and video editing.

But gaming is not left out altogether as 3D modeling/digital content creation also applies to developing games for the PC. Its not quite the ideal card for shooting up opponents in Unreal Tourney '07, but it is for creating those high-polygon count models.

Purav

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RE: hmm

By hyperbolicparody on 4/25/2006 11:13:15 AM , Rating: 2

Extensive computer modeling and visualization. For both coal and gas (oil and natural) there's a lot of "guessing" involved. However, lots of modeling and visualization goes on to give a good idea of where the best bet it.

For the past 75 years we've only known about 20 year's worth of gas. Right now we only know about 15 or so. Being heavily dependant on finding new sources, gas companies put lots of money into finding it (completely seperate from the insane markups you see in refineries, the people getting rich are the refiners).

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needlessly big?

By sadffffff on 4/25/2006 4:56:14 AM , Rating: 2

i wonder, did they make it huge on purpose so people wouldnt buy it and put it in their gaming rigs? looks like theres a lot of unused space on the pcb.

RE: needlessly big?

By Tsuwamono on 4/25/2006 7:43:13 AM , Rating: 2

Keep in mind this is an industrial GPU. The Company i work for builds boards with chips that cost more then your whole computer in most cases.(about 2000$ for one chip) Our boards look like they have alot of unused space on them but they are 16 layered boards. This card is probably something similar to what we build. Most likely that empty space is jam packed full of pathways or RAM. My guess is they werent really thinking about the Gamers in this case. We sell about 100 mill. per day at our plant alone. About 1-2% of that are PC parts. The rest of our shipments are for industrial use and make our PCs look like calculators.

In short... i think the "empty" space is packed full of pathways or RAM. Most likely gamers were not in their minds.

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RE: needlessly big?

By rushfan2006 on 4/25/2006 2:17:08 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
We sell about 100 mill. per day at our plant alone.

Dollars or PCBs? Either way that would be about $36.5 BILLION per year. That seems a bit much, especially "at our planet ALONE"...what are you saying your whole company sells like a half trillion a year? LOL

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Size Matters

By ViRGE on 4/25/06, Rating: 0

Placement Matters

By Pete84 on 4/25/2006 2:39:28 AM , Rating: 2

To get my hard drive cage out, I have to remove my graphics card. There is no way that this monster would fit in my computer case (not that I need it anyway).

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RE: Size Matters

By Leomania on 4/25/2006 11:54:49 AM , Rating: 2

So are they including the Dremel you'll need to modify your case to handle that beast, or is that extra?

You and I are not the target market; these are workstation-class cards that are designed to go into either larger or customized cases. You've probably seen the internals of a Dell system before, they're not like a plain vanilla (or chocolate) ATX case; when designing a card such as this into a high-end system they'll deal with the length. You can bet Nvidia took maximum length desired by their OEM customers into account.

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sigh

By Spoelie on 4/25/2006 6:02:17 AM , Rating: 2

This isn't meant for nor priced within the gamer's market, so stop making uninformed comments. This is either a full lenght ATX card or one meant for a WTX form factor.

RE: sigh

By ViRGE on 4/25/2006 9:20:29 AM , Rating: 2

Well clearly it's a WTX card. On the previous article, it looked like it was hanging off of the edge of the ATX board(though my eyes could be playing tricks on me here), so it would have to be WTX. Still, when it's so long that it's going to be half-way in to my drive cage, I'm going to crack jokes about it.

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Right....

By Ecmaster76 on 4/25/2006 2:16:48 AM , Rating: 2

I guess you can buy this at any retailer thats carrying the Quad Geforce cards. You know the ones that have been available since each of the last several quad gpu press launches.

Oh wait...

:p

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA