Doh! I didn't see the links when I first read this thread...

Anyways, what I meant is that when you are in shaded view, or high quality shaded mode, a Quadro should look better than a stock GeForce, with the added bonus of being certified by Autodesk.

With hardware rendering, I think a Quadro should have better results than a GeForce, but when compared to software rendering, it would probaly be worse since hardware rendering doesn't have as much extra features.

Now that I have the pdf from the links on my screen, the FX 1700 does look like the better choice. If you look at the bottom, the FX 1700 beats the FX 1500 in every single benchmark, plus its got a newer GPU than the FX 1500 and a faster PCIe interface (8 GB/s vs 4 GBs). These features make it faster than the FX 1500 despite having slower memory.