The Quadro FX 540 was a performance-segment professional graphics card by NVIDIA, launched on August 9th, 2004. Built on the 110 nm process, and based on the NV43 graphics processor, in its NV43 GL variant, the card supports DirectX 9.0c. Since Quadro FX 540 does not support DirectX 11 or DirectX 12, it might not be able to run all the latest games. The NV43 graphics processor is an average sized chip with a die area of 154 mm² and 146 million transistors. It features 8 pixel shaders and 4 vertex shaders, 8 texture mapping units, and 8 ROPs. Due to the lack of unified shaders you will not be able to run recent games at all (which require unified shader/DX10+ support). NVIDIA has paired 128 MB GDDR3 memory with the Quadro FX 540, which are connected using a 128-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 300 MHz, memory is running at 250 MHz.
Being a single-slot card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 540 does not require any additional power connector, its power draw is rated at 25 W maximum. Display outputs include: 1x DVI, 1x VGA, 1x S-Video. Quadro FX 540 is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 1.0 x16 interface. The card measures 198 mm in length, 111 mm in width, and features a single-slot cooling solution. Its price at launch was 299 US Dollars.