Nvidia Quadro FX 6300m for Gaming?

[SCallahan]

Greetings.
My Dell laptop video died recently. Dell offered to replace my Inspiron 6000 (Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GS 256mb) with a Precision Workstation 6300 laptop.
The specs are the same, except they are offering me the new Nvidia Quadro FX 3600m 512mb card.

I travel a lot (usually with (3) 9 cell batteries on hand) and do mostly online gaming (Second Life, WOW, LOTRO).

I know that the 7900 GS was only 20 watts, and the 6300m is a whopping 70 watts. So Im worried about battery life and excess heat.

But my real question is, will gaming be better on the 3600m vs the 7900 GS given the power/battery trade-off? How about if I use GeForce drivers instead?

Thank you!

 

[boonality]

you plan to carry a tower around instead of a laptop? I'm not sure I understand. Shouldn't they replace your laptop with another laptop instead?

 

[LukeBird]

you plan to carry a tower around instead of a laptop? I'm not sure I understand. Shouldn't they replace your laptop with another laptop instead?

The Precision Workstation 6300 the OP mentioned is a laptop....
A very nice machine, but I can't imagine a Quadro being a good choice for gaming.
Quadros are normally for the CAD/CAM market and are better for pure number crunching than decent DX rendering, but I'm happy to be proved wrong!
I would imagine the power usage will really hurt battery life, but if it has higher capacity batteries then it won't really matter
Is there anything else they are offering?
Seems odd to exchange a home/small business laptop for a professional, portable desktop one...

 

[ainarssems]

There must be a mistake. Precision 6300 have Quadro FX 1600m video card as standart . And ther is no such thing as FX 6300m card. Did You mean FX 3600m? If it is FX 3600m go for it, if it has FX 1600m ask them to offer something else.

 

[bliq]

The quadros use the same cores as the gdforce cards but add more powerful openGL related stuff. I have an HP workstation with a QuadroFX 5500 here at the office and it seems to game as well as a 7800GTX, which it is based off of.

A waste of money if you're not doing design or engineering work, but if they're going to *give* it to you, then it's a good trade off. In fact, it might make sense to sell off the replacement laptop and get a new one, given there's a premium for workstation class graphics cards- they're usually expensive. list for my FX5500 is about $1500, while the 7800GTX was about $500.

 

[skittle]

Quadro anything is not good for gaming. The hardware is very similar, but the driver architecture is vastly different

 

[SCallahan]

Greetings. Sorry for the error. The Precision 6300 is a laptop. The card they are offering is a Quadro FX 3600m, (not 6300m).

*Bliq* - selling the machine might be a good idea. The 3600m lists as a $600 upgrade from the 1600m on Dell's website.

*Skittle* - I realize the driver architecture is vastly different. But cant you use a Geforce Driver from LaptopVideo2Go.com or something to eek out gaming performance from the Quadros?

 

[ainarssems]

I don't thingk that You can use geforce drivers unless You have some modified drivers or at least modified .inf file for drivers. If I were You I would take it. Try it and You will see it. I would think that it will work pretty good also with quadro drivers in games. If You are not happy with it and You cannot get geforce drivers to work with it sell it and buy another one.