Workstation-class hardware like NVIDIA Quadro video cards tend to receive a really bad rap in the gaming community because the cost-to-performance ratio is not anywhere near as good as the GeForce cards that are designed and optimized specifically for gaming. Some have even gone to the point of claiming that you cannot play games on NVIDIA Quadro video cards at all! In this article we will examine the gaming performance of Quadro cards to see how they perform in a number of games.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4GB is a very interesting card in that it really isn’t that much faster than the cards already available, but it has a dramatically lower power draw – 80W less than the GTX 780 or GTX 780Ti.
Virtual desktops with NVIDIA GRID offer a great way to provide users with tons of computing performance without the need for each user to have their own individual PC. We took the time to setup and use a virtual desktop for a variety of applications to see if we think virtual desktops will be the future of computing or if they will simply be another niche technology.
Recently, a question came up in one of our department meetings: are video cards getting more or less reliable? There are times when it feels like video cards are failing left and right and we start to pine for the “good old days”. Then, we remember how hot Fermi cards used to run. To get a more accurate answer this question, we decided to examine our GPU failure logs and break down the numbers by generation.
The Kraken G10 from NZXT tackles GPU cooling in a way that we at Puget Systems have always wanted to see, but have not had the time or expertise to make happen ourselves. Instead of providing a whole cooling solution, the Kraken G10 is simply a metal bracket and fan that allows you to mount various different closed-loop coolers. These coolers are traditionally used for CPUs and allow you to custom tailor your video card cooling much like you can for your CPU.
AMD’s new Radeon R9 290X includes a hardware switch that changes the card between two fan profiles called “Quiet” and “Uber”. The Quiet profile makes the card run quieter at the cost of performance, but we have found that online reviews show much less of a performance drop than we tested ourselves. In this article, we decided to expand our normal testing to discover what might be causing this discrepancy.
Many hardware sites have shown in the past that video cards do not show any performance decrease by running in x8 mode and cannot utilize the larger bandwidth provided by the latest Gen3 specification. However, video cards are getting faster and faster so we felt it this is still true. Also, with the gaining popularity of 4k displays, we also felt it was important to see if the PCI-E revision/speed would affect a video card’s performance at the much more demanding 4k resolution.
Maya 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for Maya is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
AutoCAD 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for AutoCAD is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
Premiere Pro CC utilizes the Mercury Playback Engine to take advantage of the video card to vastly improve both the performance and quality of certain features, but there is currently very little information available regarding the performance of the latest certified workstation video cards. In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of workstation cards in both single and dual configurations to find out how well the MPE in Premiere Pro CC works with both NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro video cards.
Puget Systems builds custom workstations, servers and storage solutions tailored for your work.
We provide:
Extensive performance testing
making you more productive and giving better value for your money
Reliable computers
with fewer crashes means more time working & less time waiting
Support that understands
your complex workflows and can get you back up & running ASAP
A proven track record
as shown by our case studies and customer testimonials
