Nvidia Quadro 5000: Overview
Nvidia is shortening the branding of its workstation cards. While the previous generations were dubbed Quadro FX, the new models will simply be called Quadro, followed by their model number. The FX suffix that many buyers associate with “special effects” has been dropped completely. AMD made a similar move last year, renaming its FireGL line to FirePro. The “GL,” which referenced the OpenGL graphics language, has been switched out for Pro, connoting “professional” instead.
The Quadro 5000, built by Nvidia and distributed by PNY, is considered the secret flagship of the Quadro family. Sure, there’s also the Quadro 6000, which is equivalent to the desktop GeForce GTX 480, just with an overabundance of memory. Of course, this model will surely find buyers as well, but the target audience is much smaller. That’s partly due to a steep price, but also because of there is only a limited number of applications out there that would benefit from such a card. We saw the same thing with the previous-generation Quadro FX 4800 and FX 5800.
So what kind of graphics card is the Quadro 5000, really? Well, under the hood, we find a GF100 GPU with 352 shader cores enabled. That makes it equivalent to the GeForce GTX 465 found in the desktop space, albeit a slightly chubbier and slower one. After all the, Quadro 5000 comes with more than twice as much memory as the GeForce GTX 465, but runs at lower clock speeds. The following table gives you a side-by-side comparison of the two cards.
| Specifications | Quadro 5000 | GeForce GTX 465 |
|---|---|---|
| Chip | GF100 / Fermi | GF100 / Fermi |
| Memory | 2560 MB | 1024 MB |
| Core Clock Rate | 513 MHz | 607 MHz |
| Shader Clock Rate | 1026 MHz | 1215 MHz |
| Memory Clock Rate | 1500 MHz | 1600 MHz |
In all, Nvidia launched a total of five products for the workstation and server markets.
Scalable visualization system:
- Quadro Plex 7000, 12 GB memory, 896 CUDA cores
Desktop workstation:
- Quadro 6000, 6 GB GDDR5 memory, 448 CUDA cores
- Quadro 5000, 2.5 GB GDDR5 memory, 352 CUDA cores
- Quadro 4000, 2 GB GDDR5 memory, 256 CUDA cores
Mobile workstations:
- Quadro 5000M, 2 GB GDDR5 memory, 320 CUDA cores