NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M

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 3700M

The Nvidia GeForce FX 3700M is a professional high-end workstation graphics card for laptops. It is manufactured in 65nm and is based on the G92 core with all 128 shaders enabled. The GPU is most comparable to the consumer GeForce GTX 280M with the largest difference being the manufacturing process (65nm of the 3700M vs 55nm of the 280M). The immediate successor to the 3700M is the Quadro FX 3800M, which is based on the GeForce GTX 285M but with higher clock rates and relatively similar power consumption demands.