NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700M

NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M is a professional middle class graphics card for mobile workstations (about 15"). It is based on the GeForce GT 330M graphics card with slower clock rates and therefore is a DirectX 10.1 chip that is produced in 40nm. 

Due to a special BIOS and professional drivers, the FX 880M should perform noticeably better than a 330M in professional applications (like CAD, DCC, Rendering). Another advantage for professional users are the certified drivers that should ensure a bug free experience with the most common professional applications. Futhermore, the Quadro FX drivers contain profiles for these applications to ensure the best settings (similar to the game profiles in GeForce cards).

The Quadro FX 880M is also based on the GT216 core in 40nm. The shaders are based on the desktop GTX 200 architecture and therefore a bit improved compared to the previous generation cards.

Without load, the Quadro FX 880M is able to downclock to 135 / 270 / 135 MHz (chip / shader / memory clock).

The gaming performance of the FX 880M should be beyond the GT 330M, because of the different drivers. Gamers should choose a GeForce card because of the better game support.

The chip supports Optimus for automatic switching between dedicated and integrated graphics card (e.g. in the new Core i5 CPUs). Still Optimus was for example not integrated in the Lenovo Thinkpad W510.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700M

The Nvidia Quadro FX 1700M is a professional graphics adapter for CAD and 3D applications. It is based on the G96 core (GeForce 9650M e.g.) but with different drivers, that are optimized for OpenGL and professional applications. The drivers are zertified to work flawlessly with different applications.

Compared to the Quadro FX 1600M, the FX 1700M GPU supports Powermizer 8.0.