nVidia Quadro FX4600 768MB 134Watt TDP.. anything special with this card?

[DaveLembke]

I just pulled 2 good nVidia Quadro FX4600 768MB 134 Watt TDP video cards out of a Dual-CPU server that came with 16GB DDR2 ECC RAM. Pulled the video cards out of the server because I am trying to reduce the power consumption so that only the CPUs and a weak low power consumption video card is used for BOINC crunching.

Was wondering if these video cards are anything special? The benchmarks on these Quadro FX4600 cards are weaker than my nVidia GT 730 and they are power hungry.

Looking online I found some for sale on amazon and the price tags for them to me at least dont seem realistic for a video card that performs lesser than a much cheaper GT 730 benchmark score video card. https://www.amazon.com/SBUY-Quadro-FX4600-Expressx16-768MB/dp/B000R99H9O?SubscriptionId=AKIAJ3NOW7JKGQLTEY4A&tag=cnet-api-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000R99H9O

Is there an advantage to these that justifies a price tag on amazon to be more expensive than a GTX 750 ti video card? Or are the price tags just a premium for someone wanting this specific Quadro FX4600 video card?

[BC_Programmer]

The Quadro's are older workstation cards, and are not meant for "gaming" so benchmarks aren't going to be a great comparison. As the performance advantages afforded a Quadro won't usually be visible except when using workstation CAD software. Mind you, these performance improvements are, ironically, not actually hardware performance improvements, but rather the drivers using a more optimized code-path only for Quadro cards.

In the interest of fairness the GT 730 is also 7 years newer (2014 compared to FX 4600's 2007 release), so one would rather hope it outperforms the Quadro.

[Salmon Trout]

Even in 2007, reviewers said things like this

Also, the street price of €1650 is too high, considering how well ATI's competing product performs.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for the info on this. Server had a date stamped onto it with 2010 on cover panel with ink and thought this server was newer than 2007. Must be an end of the product line server, one of  the last ones before a newer model replaced it so I was thinking it was 6 years old hardware wise, yet as you pointed out its 2007 hardware, which I also just found when looking at the datasheet. http://static.highspeedbackbone.net/pdf/HP-xw9400-Workstation-Datasheet.pdf

I figured there must have been something specific the video cards were good for, and so it appears that CAD is where they are best used vs video games.

I got for free a HP xw9400 with following specs:

Dual CPU Opteron  2216 (2.40 GHz)
16GB ECC DDR2 667Mhz RAM
2 x nVidia Quatro FX 4600 768mb video cards

rest of the specs common xw9400 build as on datasheet.

Was in the process of making it a lesser power consuming system for crunching data for BOINC. Initially I ran BOINC on it to see if BOINC supported the GPU's to crunch data on those as well, but BOINC doesnt show that it detects the GPU's, so I removed the video cards to lighten the power consumption. With the build as it was with the dual Quadro video cards the system was pulling 406 watts continuous at both CPUs at 100% while crunching at 4 cores ( 2 x dualcores ). Removing the video cards dropped the power draw to 319 watts continuous. I was going to try for 250 watts power draw with the dual CPU system, but because the main board doesnt have integrated video I had to add a video card to it and so the 9800 GT 512MB PCI-E video card I added plus all the fans etc is likely why 319 watts is as low as i will get it to go. I tried using an even lesser power consuming ATI Rage 128 PCI 8MB video card to drop the power even more but Linux Mint 17.3 doesnt have a suitable video driver for a 8MB video card.

Was looking into replacing the dual core opteron's with 2 x quadcore opteron's, but lots of google hits with people running into issues with having to edit BIOS ROM files custom for the builds boot block to support the dual quadcore upgrade plus bridging a connection on the motherboard, so i might avoid that to avoid bricking an otherwise healthy system. More info here on modding people have needed to do to run quadcore CPUs on the xw9400. While I am generally adventurous with hardware modding, I dont want to kill this build, so I will probably avoid a potential smoke show. http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f15/solved-upgrading-xw9400-mobo-567269.html

In the process of optimizing systems I have for data crunching my making them more lean and figuring out which systems are better per watt for crunching than others to make 2 groups of systems. One group of the most efficient in data crunching per watt used, and the others to bring online as inefficient toasters during the winter months to make heat for home and help science with the data crunched as a beneficial by product to making heat in home with computers. The group of systems more efficient for work units per watt will stay on more often for more run hours then the weaker processing power hungry systems.

Just got another Core i5 laptop running last night to fix its thermal shutdown by removing keyboard and setting keyboard off to side and  adding thermal compound to top of heat pipes directly over the i5 CPU and placing a Pentium 4 massive heatsink resting on it to passively cool the i5 that the failed heat pipes were unable to cool. Dropped it from 105C and then shutdown to a constant 62C passively cooled from the massive Pentium 4 passive heatsink from a DELL. So I now have that crunching at 43 watts of power draw safely vs thermal shutdowns. 

Going to bring some ARM processor devices online too to crunch boinc and their power draw is so small for the data crunched which is cool. BOINC only runs when they are connected to a charge cable. I was given a tablet for free because the user wanted the newer Android and the tablet didnt support newer Android, so thats on Android 4.4 and when not using tablet it crunches and hardly any heat, and when I need the tablet and its unplugged from charge cable BOINC doesnt run to drain battery. Its a smart implementation of crunching data with ARM processor devices since so many people leave devices charging even when fully charged so why not use the ARM processors during this time to crunch. 

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[BC_Programmer]

It is somewhat interesting that the changes seem to be in the drivers, I think- that is, the Quadro cards didn't actually provide anything special themselves and were otherwise identical to their consumer counterparts (aside from a lower clock speed) but the drivers would basically enable additional optimizations only for Quadro cards, with consumer cards using a much slower implementation. Cheeky.

I tried using an even lesser power consuming ATI Rage 128 PCI 8MB video card to drop the power even more but Linux Mint 17.3 doesnt have a suitable video driver for a 8MB video card.

Yeah that's quite an old card so would probably require a distribution aimed at lower-end hardware. The Radeon 7000 integrated into my Thinkpad T41 even suffers from lack-of-support with most current Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Mint).