Building A High End Quadro FX Workstation

An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has an article detailing some of the differences between building a high-end workstation and a high-end gaming system. They go into things like ECC memory, and the difference between professional and gaming 3D cards. The Quadro FX 2000 coverage is particularly interesting -- the system with the Quadro FX 2000 was never louder than 55 dB!"

SGI should be put out of its misery

[Proc6]

Not intending to start a Holy War, I realize the 64 CPU monsters have their place but their workstations are just ignorant (this is coming from a previous SGI only owner)...

"These systems were around $40,000 when first released. Each R12000 400MHz has a SpecFP2000 of around 350-360 and so it's approximately equal to an Athlon 1.2GHz. The caveat is that the SpecFP2000 benchmark is actually made up of a bunch of other, smaller, tests. For computational fluid dynamics or neural network image recognition, the 400MHz SGI CPU is 2.5 to 5 times faster than the Athlon!"

WOW! 2.5 times faster than a 1.2Ghz Athlon!? Man, you'd almost need a $168 2.4 Ghz Athlon [pricewatch.com] to keep up! I wish they made them!

P.S. The 3.06 Ghz P4 is just under 1000 on the SpecFP benchmark [specbench.org].