After going through the technical specifications and various documents that NVIDIA supplied, we came to the conclusion that the closest card the Quadro FX3400 comes to is the 6800GT. Sadly, we didn’t have one at hand, but what we did have was the 6800GS. Therefore, we decided to test the FX3400 against the 6800GS to get a general sense of its performance.

As always, we overclocked the cards and this time got pretty good results. The Quadro FX3400 comes with a stock speed of 350MHz for the core and 900MHz for the memory. We promptly upped it to 401MHz and 1GHz, respectively, ran a few benchmarks to make sure that the adapter was stable, and then proceeded for the final round of testing.

For the XFX 6800GS, the stock speeds are 475MHz and 1.1GHz, which we also overclocked to 515MHz and 1.13GHz. Note that the reference clock speed for a 6800GS is 450MHz; this means that the card can clock up to 65MHz, which is a good 15 percent.

We benchmarked the cards under two environments: professional 3D applications and games. For the former, we used SpecviewPerf 8.1, and for the latter, we used 3DMark05, Doom3 and F.E.A.R. The testbed included an AMD Athlon X2 4800+, 1GB DDR400 RAM (2-2-2-5), ASUS A8Nx32-SLI (Beta BIOS 0805), and a Seagate 120GB 7,200RPM SATA HDD.

The reason for including only two games was quite simple, we just wanted a rough idea in regards to the Quadro FX3400's performance. We don’t intend to purchase the Quadro FX3400 for gaming anyway, and it's not to be considered for enthusiasts unless it's for a professional environment, so we decided to keep it short and give you a quick look.

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