Need Advice: Quadro (Fermi) or FirePro?

[Dralthi]

ATI cards tend to be longer. I've heard it's because of their power stages, but I'm no engineer. Those idle power figures seem wrong, though? Unless it's because they don't throttle them like desktop cards?

Yea, my mistake. I looked up some reviews on the V7800 and the power consumption is around 150W-idle and 250W-load. Average temp is around 60 degrees Celsius.

 

[Dralthi]

I found some decent reviews of the V3800, V4800, V5800, and V7800. Some comparisons to the Quadro 4000 and Quadro 5000 as well.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_firepro_v4800_v7800&num=1

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-ATI-FirePro-Roundup-V7800-V4800-V3800/?page=1

http://jonpeddie.com/reviews/commen...o-5000-firepro-v9800-and-firepro-v7800-review

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=926&type=expert&pid=8

It seems like the Quadro 4000 and V7800 have the best performance-per-dollar as opposed to a Quadro 2000 and V5800 respectively.

 

[Dralthi]

**UPDATE**

Thought I'd post an update in case anyone else out there was looking for the same advice.

I took the plunge and ended up purchasing an AMD FirePro 5800 graphics card. After a little more research on the Internet, I found that the 5800 performed relatively close to the same performance of the 7800 in a lot of tests, so I figured I'd save a little money and go with the 5800. And I'm glad I did!

I have noticed a few performance improvements with this card compared to my previous consumer-grade card, the ATI Radeon 1950 Pro.

I did a test on my old system with the Radeon 1950 card using 3D Studio Max where I took a generic model of a teapot and subdivided the polygons on it until I hit around 1,000,000 polygons. The performance of the viewports degraded so much that the application eventually crashed and I had to restart the computer.

I did the same test on my new system with the FirePro 5800 card using AMD's 3DS Max Performance Driver. Not only was I able to easily surpass 1,000,000 polygons, but I duplicated the teapot model 6 or 7 times and only had a minimal drop in frames-per-second within the viewports. I was able to easily rotate around, edit and animate the objects in the viewport with little peformance drops.

This card is great for programs that use high-polygon 3D modeling and sculpting techniques, such as zBrush and Mudbox, so I'm happy to get this kind of performance finally. I often had issues with viewport degradation and frame rate drops when working with high-polygon models on a consumer-grade card.

While I didn't purchase this card with the intention of playing games that much, I did try out StarCraft II on it, and so far I've been able to play the game with all graphics settings on Ultra with no problems. The frame rate holds at a pretty consistent 45-48 fps, which is good enough for me.

In conclusion, everything seems to be working out OK with this card. I now have the ability to do some more intense DCC and high-polygon 3D work while occasionaly dabbling in some gaming, and I didn't need to break the bank in the process, which is exactly what I wanted. :thumbsup:

I can always Crossfire with another 5800 if I need more performance later on. So that's good too.

-Dralthi