Quadro 2000 Review

[ir_cow]

Updated 06-01-12

 

Introduction:

 

Now one of the Newest Quadro cards to be released; the Quadro 2000 is based on Fermi architecture. Listed under “mid-range” $500 price point from Nvidia, this card has much more going for it than Nvidia would like us to believe. The card is to replace the Quadro 1800 FX. Specs show it may be nearing the performance of last generation Quadro 3800 FX which is listed under “High-End”. Being based on 106 GPU it shares the same chip as the GTS 450 but optimized for the workstation environment. The Clock Speed was lowered to reduce power intake and ultimately leaving it without a 6-pin power connector. This is a good sign for a quiet and cool running video card but bad if you were thinking about overclocking it (More on that later). What stands Quadros apart from the consumer cards is the stability and performance gain over a Geforce card. No different this time around, the Quadro 2000 is well rounded with 1GB of GDDR5 Ram and 625/1251Mhz clock. Let’s take a closer look.

Closer Look: Box art & Size

 

PNY is the only Quadro card maker which gives them the power to choice how to package the cards. They go with a simple look this time around but I was disappointed to find the card was more or less “floating” in its plastic holder. A $400 card should have a little more care to it and maybe a good form holder would be nice.

 

Yup, it’s really a Quadro 2000

 

Nice clean design but lacking SLi and G-Sync connector really lands this as a “mid-range” card because lack up upgradeability. If you want more, you better spend more.

 

This was a very disappointing thing to find this on a band new card. This is a picture left over residue from the soldering process all over the back of the card. It’s like someone forgot to clean the card up. I’m also not really sure at what point you would avoid this (before or after the soldering?). In any case it’s a very sticky card making it not nice to handle while installing.

 

Drivers:

 

Quadro Drivers are a little different than any Gerforce one. The options under “Global Settings” has expanded greatly for every sort of 3D and 2d Professional app. Gone is presets for video games, but that is expect since Quadros aren’t meant to be gaming on.

 

Another option is under “Workstation” which lets your setup in dept settings for your monitor. This gives you fine control over color and drivers being used.

 

Specifications:

 

 

Processing Units:

Core :106

Graphics Processing Clusters: Unknown

Streaming Multiprocessors :Unknown

CUDA Cores :192

Texture Units :Unknown

ROP Units :16

 

Clock Speeds:

Graphics Clock (Fixed Function Units) 625mhz

Processor Clock (CUDA Cores) 1251mhz

Memory Clock (Clock rate / Data rate) 652mhz

 

Memory:

Total Video Memory 1024MB GDDR5

Memory Interface 128-bit

Total Memory Bandwidth 41.7 GB/s

 

 

Features:

 

Provided by Nvidia.com

Next-Generation NVIDIA® CUDA™ Architecture

Breakthrough NVIDIA Fermi architecture incorporates CUDA parallel computing capabilities and advanced visualization to deliver performance that greatly accelerates professional workflows.

NVIDIA® Scalable Geometry Engine™

Dramatically improves geometry performance across a broad range of CAD, DCC and medical applications, enabling you to work interactively with models and scenes that are an order of magnitude more complex than ever before.

Large Framebuffers with Ultra-Fast Bandwidth

Large GPU memory with fast bandwidth for accelerating the display of complex models and scenes, as well as performing complex computation on large datasets.

NVIDIA® Parallel DataCache™

Supports a true cache hierarchy combined with on-chip shared memory. L1 and L2 caches drive exceptional throughput, accelerating features such as real-time ray tracing, physics and texture filtering.

NVIDIA® GigaThread™ Engine

Provides up to 10x faster context switching compared to previous generation architectures, concurrent kernel execution, and improved thread block scheduling.

30-bit color fidelity

30-bit color fidelity (10-bits per color) enables billions rather than millions of color variations for rich, vivid image quality with the broadest dynamic range.

NVIDIA® Mosaic Technology

NVIDIA® Mosaic Technology¹ enables transparent scaling of any application across up to eight display channels.

Full-Scene Antialiasing (FSAA)

Up to 64X FSAA dramatically reduces visual aliasing artifacts or “jaggies,” resulting in unparalled image quality and highly realistic scenes.

 

 

 

Testing: Setup & Overclocking

• Processor Intel Core I7 920 [email protected]

• Cooling: Stock Cooler

• Motherboard: AsRock X58 Extreme

• Memory: 6x2gb DDR3 1066

• Video Card(s): NVIDIA GTS 450, ASUS GTX 285, Evga GTs 450

• Power Supply: Seasonic x650 Gold

• Hard Drive: 1x Seagate 500gb 7200.12

• Optical Drive: HP DVD

• OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

• Case: Cooler Master HAF 922

 

Comparison Video Cards:

• Quadro 2000

• Asus GTX 285

• Evga GTS 450 Superclocked

 

 

Benchmark Tests:

1. SPECview 11

2. Cinebench 10 64x

3. Cinebench 11 64x

4. Photoshop (Beauty Box Plugin)

5. Final Fantasy 14 Benchmark

6. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.1

7. 3DMark 06

8. 3DMark Vantage

9. Crysis Benchmark

 

SPECviewperf 1280:

Nvidia Offical Score Test Rig (SPECviewperf® 11: for more information www.spec.org. Tested on single proc 3.3 GHz Quad Core Xeon® w5590, x58, Windows 7-64, Driver Release rel 260+)

 

As you see here in the SPECviewperf benchmark it shows off the difference between a professional card and customer card. The scores are based on a average from a mean. It does not represent frames per second but it feels like it when you see objects moving slowly. The Red and Yellow is Nvidia official score from their website. The only problem was I could not find what resolution it was running at. It’s a guess but it matches more or less. I did find however the Maya-03 ran with issues as test #5 and 6 just more for less froze and went avg of .5fp. After Reinstalling the drivers with no luck the issue may be in the newest drivers. Lastly as you can see SLi for comsumer cards has zero effect on score. In some ways it seemed slower. If you are thinking about buying two gaming cards to outperform a professional one, think again.

 

Update: Using newer drivers I was able to resolve the Quadro Maya issue. It was about 6 months later when the (at the time) current drivers came out and i re-ran this benchmark once again. unfortunately I did not record the number but I remember it was 50~ range.

SPECviewperf 1080:

Running it at 1080 doesn’t change the score much, it’s simply a way to show another resolution you may be working at. One thing that is out of place is GTS 450 on ensight-04 which is keeping up with the Quadro. Once again, I redid the drivers and ran the test a few times and nothing changed. I currently have no proper conclusion until I can find out how demanding ensight really is.

 

During the initial test I thought the AA option in the benchmark was working until I was playing around with the new Quadro options to go up to 64x. I stumbled across that fact that AA only worked when I forced it for the Spec benchmark. Until I am able to re-run the GTS 450 and GTX 285, all you get is the proper Quadro scores. The performance drop is not huge and I prefer the quality of 4x making the geometry smooth in wireframe.

 

Cinebench 10

As you can see Cinema 4D has little impact on which card you use. Of course Cinebench 10 is old by this point so let’s look at Cinebench 11.

 

Cinebench 11

With Cinebench 11 the same idea stands. It really doesn’t matter which card you have. Even a entry level card like GTS 450 pulls in with 36fps. What I did find interesting was when you overclock the CPU the FPS goes up. during the test you can see the car run over cones with physics from the CPU. Once being CPU bound is eliminated it’s even less of issue which card you have. Lastly it looks as the Quadro 2000 wasn’t CPU bound, even at 4ghz it gain nothing. Same goes for the GTS 450, it’s just not powerful enough to be held back by the CPU.

 

Photoshop Plugin

The newest addition of Adobe Photoshop has added even more support to GPU usage. CS5 has options to move the workload of resizing, filters, masking, etc to the GPU over the CPU. While this can cause corruption in the final product, this is something you don’t have to worry about while using a Quadro card. If you fear the loss of quality on some crucial work you can also turn off GPU acceleration. The Beauty Box plugin is a great example of what is to come in offloading workloads. This plugin operates like any CUDA app would. As you can see if you don’t mind a crash once in a while, any card will do and the more cores it has the faster it will render the final product. The only reason to stick with a Professional card would be to ensure stability while working. I can’t stress stability enough as when I used a GTX 285 on a daily bases I could guarantee a crash at least once a week in Photoshop. It’s never fun to redo an hour of hard work.

 

Final Fantasy 14

This is the first of many benchmarks geared to gaming. No surprise here, the Quadro is the slowest and the specs show it. If you really wanted to you could game just find at 1280x720.

 

Heaven Benchmark 2.1

Originally I ran everything at DX11 forgetting the GTX 285 doesn’t support it. While Tessellation looks great, it’s unfair to compare since it has a larger impact on performance. Not much to report on this since they are performs as I expected. I will say that the Quadro had really good color repetition something that made me go check the Nvidia settings to see if I left something on. One of Quadros strong point is they keep the colors accurately. Even with my monitored already calibrated something is just lost when a Geforce card is rendering and I wish all users could see games “How it’s Meant to be Played”

 

3DMark 06

3dmark 06 by this point is quite old and doesn’t really show anything worthwhile. Unless of course you are using this benchmark to compare an older card, this benchmark can be disregarded.

 

3DMark Vantage

While Vantage was heavily criticized during launch for what games will look like in the future over what was being shown at the time. We now can see with many games are coming out with Physx and HDR lighting. It is not too far off from what is currently being put out these days and worth a closer look. We see the Quadro lagging behind again but the main propose is to show it can stay within a playable frame rate.

 

But can it play Crysis?

An ongoing joke across the web and forums, I had to poke fun at it. Other than showing its unplayable the main reason was to see what kind of workload it can take. These days’ games like Crysis are made in an open Sandbox world where hundreds of artists and programmers can work in real time on the same project. ID software is a good example as “Rage” is being made with an open Sandbox engine. Things will literally pop in and out of existence as you are working on something. By looking at the benchmark unless you lower the settings or get a better Quadro it’s going to be hard to make a level at 12fps. This is future of making games in a large firm I believe.

 

Temperature:

The Quadro 2000 may have a small heatsink but doesn’t produce enough heat to really warrant much bigger. Personally I would have liked a two slot GTS 450 heatsink but you can’t have everything. The temps under Furmark are around 70c~. After about 5 minutes of slowly climbing up, it doesn’t go any higher. This is very unrealistic environment because nothing can stress a card out that much but it’s good to see it sticking well under the 95c limit.

 

Noise:

The Quadro 2000 isn’t as quiet as Nvidia tries to play it off. Rated “Official” at 28db I can’t hear it over any stock fan. What I can hear is the high pitch squeal when the fan runs at full speed. It’s not the same as when a card is running Folding@home which gives a similar squealing sound. Simply put if you have a loud computer you won’t even know it is running. Otherwise I suggest investing in the silencer form to eliminate this high pitch sound.

 

Power Consumption:

N/A Simply don’t have the right measurement tools. Easily countered by the fact that the card on paper only draws 63watts without a 6pin connector.I would recommend even with a fully decked out system (as in the test rig) a Quality 400watt psu would not break a sweat.

Conclusion:

The Quadro 2000 is a well rounded card for its price. Keeping close to the last generations higher end cards and well outperforming the old mid range, this card has something going for it. I was however very disappointed to find in small print that only Quadro 5000 and 6000 have ECC memory. Nvidia was selling the idea left and right that I didn’t think to check until I noticed the option wasn’t present in the control panel. Very sneaky of Nvidia and I don’t see a reason not to include ECC ram in all the cards since it can only cost dollars more to them per card. This true is a downside since you can’t count on CUDA not producing any errors during a large task. Overall I can only suggest this card to a few select cases. That being (A) Already looking at the price point being the maximum you can spend. (B) Looking to upgrade from entry level to something that can keep up and not struggle. (C ) Not working on critical workloads. That being said the Quadro 5000 is currently $1,700 on Newegg. A very steep price point for true stability in the sense ECC ram is just a redundancy to a already quality product and drivers. I would not expect a Quadro card of any kind to crash because of a driver issues. Unlike my time using a consumer card for many years, Maya and Photoshop constantly crashed during the oddest times and just came natural to Ctrl+S every minute.

 

 

Pros:

• Great performance

• Low noise

• Low Power Requirements

 

Cons:

• Small Heatsink

• No ECC Memory

• Lacking SLI

 

Score: 8/10

 

Update: Since the update I have been able to run a GTX 570 and Qaudro 3700. Since it is not on the old test bed I cannot officially include them into the review. I will in the coming weeks re-run the benchmarks to include them on the correct platform. I also found it interesting for observations that the GTX 570 was faster than Quadro 2000 in and ONLY in the viewport 2.0. Because i cannot benchmark this, it's purely my own observations. Moving a 25 Million Polygon model was fast and responsive with the GTX 570. Using the same 3d model the Quadro 2000 was slow to move and respond in the viewport 2.0.

 

Here is a look at what is to come.

Using a i7-3930K, Asus P9X79 WS, Quadro 3700, SSD and 64GB (8x8gb) G-skill 1600 Here is the Specs scores for the Quadro 3700, GTX 570 and Quadro FX 4800

 

Quadro FX 4800

Viewperf 11 - 1080x1920 0xAA

------------------------------------------------------

catia-03 25.42

ensight-04 15.10

lightwave-01 41.93

maya-03 42.85

proe-05 10.57

sw-02 35.30

tcvis-02 18.21

snx-01 17.80

 

Cinebench 11.5

GPU: 46.74 fps

 

Quadro 3700:

Viewperf 11 - 1080x1920 0xAA:

-------------------------------------------------

catia-03 9.80

ensight-04 9.32

lightwave-01 17.21

maya-03 9.90

proe-05 4.12

sw-02 15.74

tcvis-02 5.84

snx-01 11.79

 

Viewperf 11 - 1280x1024 0xAA:

------------------------------------------------

catia-03 9.92

ensight-04 9.60

lightwave-01 11.97

maya-03 8.84 (slower than 1080)

proe-05 3.79

sw-02 15.77

tcvis-02 5.56

snx-01 12.07

 

Cinebench 11.5

GPU: 28.9 fps

 

 

GTX 570 ASUS DirectCUII

---------------------------------

Viewperf 11 - 1280x1024 0xAA:

catia-03 5.39

ensight-04 38.17

lightwave-01 15.06

maya-03 12.90

proe-05 1.44

sw-02 8.93

tcvis-02 0.96

snx-01 2.91

 

Cinebench 11.5

GPU: 51.72 fps

Edited December 8, 2012 by hornybluecow

[El_Capitan]

Nice. How come only PNY produces workstation graphics cards for Nvidia?

[Waco]

Pros:

• Great performance

• Low noise

• Low Power Requirements

 

Cons:

• Small Heatsink

• No ECC Memory

• Lacking SLI

So it's essentially a neutered GTS450 without the hobbled driver for professional apps? Seems like it'd be more cost effective to buy the 450 and use the modded drivers.

Edited February 14, 2011 by Waco

[ir_cow]

If you could softmod it than your saving a ton of cash. I still have some work left to this review because I want to flash the 450 if you can

[SpeedCrazy]

Nice review. You went it to a good bit of depth.

 

Purely technical, but some gramar and spelling mistakes. Oh and i hate reading miles of small font.

[Boinker]

Just to ask this question... "did you try to overclock it"

 

 

[ir_cow]

Not yet but I will soon. First I need to do some editing because I don't like the print either and pictures. You can only do so much in the forums

 

well one test down. i flashed the GTS 450 to a quadro and it didn't work so well. i could see a image but sure wasn't viewable. second i was looking into soft modding and all i can see is that you can no longer do it after the 8000 series. i'll have to read into it more and try it myself.

Edited February 15, 2011 by hornybluecow

[ir_cow]

Update: i'm testing 3Ds Max performance drivers now. took me a bit to find a 3ds max benchmark.. will post once done.

[ir_cow]

I'm in the process of updating this review. I found that you no longer need 3ds MAX drivers past 2011 (nvidia doesn't provide them past 2011 version) I can only assume it doesn't have the same effect as it once did. Second, I'm working to re-run a GTX 570 and Quadro 3700 on the i7 920 since the new data i have is only for the new platform.

[ir_cow]

Update;

 

Added Quadro FX 4800 and found out why Quadro looks better on screen.

 

Looks better because Quadros Support 30-bit displays which can display 1 billion colors over the standard 16.7 million colors. If you have a display port and a monitor that support it (Dell PremierColor UltraSharps or a HP DreamColor Series) you will see much wider range of colors with a Quadro.

[d6bmg]

^^ That's a long bump.