Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Quadro FX 4500 SLI: The King of Professional Graphics Card Market. NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 SLI Performance Unveiled

9:48 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Not only gaming community can benefit from such performance increasing technologies as multi-GPU platforms. For example, a pair of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics cards can be united just as conventional NVIDIA GeForce-series graphics accelerators. While with the case of the GeForce family this will benefit gaming experience, NVIDIA SLI platform with Quadro graphics cards installed is aimed at other audience, such as graphics designers.

3D Professor has taken a look at a system which can be called as graphics designer dream machine. The examined workstation is based on Supermicro H8DCE mainboard sporting a pair of dual core AMD Opteron 254 microprocessors, accompanied by a total of 4GB of Corsair PC3200 ECC registered memory and two NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics cards running in SLI mode. In order to determine the benefit of adding an extra GPU to the system the author tested the platform in a series of benchmarks both with single graphics card installed and in SLI mode.

“Within no less of a period than 6 months NVIDIA’s might and power has brought to the professional market a range of cards which are second to none with solid robust driver sets supporting them all.  It further goes to prove how prompt they are at maintaining the uptake of new technology and delivering it - most importantly on time to the ever demanding professional.  This is a feat that has to be admired and prized and full kudos has to be awarded to their engineers and driver team who just keep pushing their cards further and further to the extreme,” writes 3D Professor.

• 3D Professor: EXTREME High Speed Nvidia and Supermicro.

Chipset Serial ATA RAID Performance Compared. Intel vs NVIDIA Chipset RAID Performance Investigated

9:48 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Storage technologies have come a long way from Parallel ATA technology in the nineties. Because of cost-efficiency of Serial ATA and the demand for fast and reliable storage, redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is now a wide spread feature even on desktops.

The Serial ATA RAID support is included in the majority of today’s chipsets. While built-in RAID controllers were introduced a couple of years ago only the latest generation of Intel’s and NVIDIA’s chipsets support arrays of up to four drives and the RAID 5 mode.

The Tech Report has posted an in-depth head-to-head comparison of Intel’s ICH7R I/O controller and NVIDIA’s nForce4 media and communication processor performance in different RAID modes setups.

“We’ve spent a couple of months running Intel’s ICH7R and NVIDIA’s nForce4 Serial ATA RAID controllers through our exhaustive suite of storage tests, and the results are something to behold. We started with a single drive and worked our way up through RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 0+1, and 5 with two, three, and even four hard drives,” says the author.

“Based on our test results, the nForce4 looks like a superior RAID platform for desktop systems. The nForce4’s performance in the majority of our FC-Test and iPEAK tests is better than that of the ICH7R, and in single-user tests, NVIDIA’s RAID 5 implementation is less crippling than Intel’s. While the nForce4 performs strongly in single-user tasks, it’s easily outclassed by the ICH7R under multi-user loads in IOMeter. We’ve seen NVIDIA RAID controllers hit a wall in IOMeter before, and the nForce4 has real problems scaling array performance beyond 16 outstanding I/Os. The ICH7R, on the other hand, scales beautifully under increasingly heavy loads, and it even doubles the transaction rate of the nForce4 in some cases. This stellar IOMeter performance makes the ICH7R the clear choice for servers and other demanding multi-user environments, even if it’s a slightly less attractive option for desktop systems,” concludes The Tech Report.

• The Tech Report: Chipset Serial ATA and RAID Performance Compared.

Archive
All Latest News