Nvidia Quadro 5000

Nvidia Quadro 5000

Nvidia has fared well in the consumer space with its last couple of generations of video cards, scoring excellent performance numbers with cards like the GeForce GTX 480, GTX 580, and the dual-GPU GTX 590, due in no small part to the implementation of its innovative Fermi GPU architecture. That technology was never intended just for gaming graphics, however, so it's no great surprise that it does just as much good when integrated into Nvidia's Quadro line of workstation cards. The high-end model in that series, the Quadro 5000, may be expensive, but it delivers superlative features and performance and features that will justify its $2,249 (list) price for professionals who need its power. Foremost among the Quadro 5000's specs are its 352 CUDA parallel processing cores clocked at 513MHz and 2.5GB of GDDR5 frame buffer memory. In addition to running at 750MHz over a 320-bit interface for a total bandwidth of 120GBps, the memory also supports error-correcting code (ECC), to help guard against even minute errors that could significantly impact calculations' results. Nvidia estimates that the Quadro 5000 can render up to 950 million triangles per second.