Please Explain Quadro vs. "regular cards"

Building a CAD station for myself. Quadro cards are recommended. Why? What do they do better than gtx and whatnot cards? I've seen chatter that they are the same except for drivers and some soft modding? Reality?


Any recommendations on affordable 300-400$ cad cards?

thanks

Generally workstation class video card offers better customer support if you need it. That's generally why they cost so much more than their gaming counterparts.

Support only extends to professional rendering so if you are using a Quadro to play Crysis and your PC keeps crashing don't expect customer support to help you.

The drivers are MUCH better for CAD and engineering applications. here is a link to a review that shows the GTX280 and it's exact workstation card, the Quattro FX 4800. The workstation card performed 10x better in these apps. You used to be able to soft or even hard mode certain cards to allow the workstation drivers, however, I do not believe you can do that anymore.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 58-10.html

I used an quadro fx 3500 for 2 years and now am currently using a 295.....The major difference ive been able notice is in 3ds max which i use mostly....the quadro had a more smoother flow when i had more geometry on screen than 295....if u r a hardcore CAD user go for the quadro or else if u want a good card for all u will be more satisfied with a gaming card....i dont notice any big difference with pro-e or catia no matter how big an assembly is.....

Does anyone here think that the business class GPUs (for lack of a better term) are higher binned parts than their consumer-grade (i.e. gaming) counterparts?