NVIDIA Breaks The GPU Bank with Quadro FX 5800

Looking to break the bank with graphics processing horsepower? NVIDIA’s  just-released Quadro FX 5800, the flagship model in its professional GPU series, and the Quadro Plex 2200 S4 Visual Computing System, a large-scale server system based on that platform, aims to up the ante, both in graphics visualization and performance.

The building block of the new entrants is the Quadro FX 5800, a $3,499 graphics card that with its 4GB of graphics memory and up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores (the equivalent of 1 teraflops of processing power) delivers the performance and scalability to visualize and interpret massive datasets that were previously unattainable on workstation-class graphics boards, according to Jeff Brown, NVIDIA’s general manager of professional solutions. Pitched for oil and gas exploration, medical imaging and high-end styling and industrial design applications, the Quadro FX 5800 can bring together and render an entire assembly interactively, with higher degrees of precision and realism previously unavailable, Brown said.

For companies looking to blend computational and graphics work simultaneously—for running crash analysis on a model, for example, making a change and then running the simulation again to see how the change impacts the basic integrity of a model–NVIDIA’s Quadro Plex 2200 comes into play. The system, available in a standard 1U form factor for large-scale server deployment, taps the power of four Quadro FX 5800 GPUs to tackle the most challenging visual supercomputing problems. The Quadro Plex 2200 will be available in December for $14,995.