LOSTCIRCUITS

Product Specs

The GeForce FX3000 reference design closely follows the GeForce FX5900 Ultra reference design with a few minor changes in the components that are not really worth getting into since they are mostly there to accommodate the slightly different requirements in the memory configuration and power circuitry / balancing. In one sentence: a professional card needs to be somewhat more robust and reliable than a consumer card that goes for a fraction of the price. In addition, professional graphics adapters don't usually feature any s-video ports, on the other hand, dual DVI is not found on consumer cards as of yet. All these "details", of course, need to be implemented in some sort of hardware, that is, DVI requires one driver chip per port, just to give one example.

As in the case of most professional cards, the actual technical specs are not disclosed, that is, there are no references as to what the core or memory frequencies might be. Since the memory bandwidth is, however, shown as 27.2GBs, it is easy to calculate the data frequency on a per pin basis (850 Mbit/sec) which, since it is DDR that is used, amounts to 425 MHz memory clock frequency.

             

Left: Close-up of the Hynix FBGA DDR components used on the Quadro FX3000. Center: Top view of the Quadro FX3000 compared to the nVidia FX5900 Ultra. Right: Connector differences: Where the Quadrp FX3000 features two DVI ports and a single 3-pin synchronization port, the FX5900 has one DVI and one VGA port plus an s-video out in the Center. The Quadro FX3000 PCB is slightly longer than the FX5900 and features two SiliconImage DVI output chips.

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