For those of you drooling over the power of the new Fermi-driven Quadro’s but without the deep pockets required for the Quadro 4000 or Quadro 5000, NVidia has come to your rescue with two new lower-end products: The Quadro 2000 and Quadro 600.
Quadro 2000
The Quadro 2000 sports 192 cores and 1GB of GDDR5 memory, and consumes a mere 62W of power and a MSRP estimated around $599. It won’t offer the same horsepower as the 4000, but it’s a great upgrade for those on previous-generation lower-end Quadro systems. It still supports the new 3D Vision Pro, their RF-upgrade to the previous 3D Vision systems, and NVidia’s SLI Multi-OS support.
But if the Quadro 2000 is still beyond your reach, then you can go all the way down to the Quadro 600. The Quadro600 sports only 96 cores, but the same 1GB of GDDR5 slightly slower DDR3 memory. Consuming only 40W, it’s estimated to be available for a mere $199, making it the bargain pricing of anyone wanting to take their bargain basement workstation to the next level. It support 3D Vision Pro, but not the SLI Multi-OS, meaning you probably won’t want to use it for development.
Quadro 600
Neither of these cards can touch the higher-end offerings for performance, but for people looking for Nvidia’s “Workstation” class performance with a budget pricing, it’s a great place to start. Both cards also support the “NVidia Mosaic Technology”, which means they have hardware and driver support to scale your desktop up across 8 cards with no special software. This could be great with the Quadro 600, offering some great low-price extreme-performance for high-end renderwall setups.
Perhaps the most impressive piece of information from this announcement is that both cards are single-width PCIe Gen2 x16 cards. This opens up the Quadro to a whole new class of small machines which can’t hold dual-width cards such as blades. There are still power and cooling concerns, especially since both cards are still actively cooled, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Update 10/6/2010: Correction, the Quadro200 does not have GDDR5, rather it has DDR3.
Hi, came across this page and I was wondering if anyone can guide me on this. I am looking for a Quadro card which supports Quad Buffering Stereo OpenGL. With regards to this, I am wondering if both cards support this?
So now we can get 10-bit displayport and quadbuffer stereo for $599? That’s fantastic, especially for users who need those features without the speed provided by the larger cards. The small size and low power consumption may also make them candidates for dedicated CUDA processors in machines that have the larger cards doing the rendering work (or vice versa, depending on which is heavier, your rendering or CUDA load).
Quadro 2000(192SP) replaces the old Quadro FX 1800(64SP), huge leap in performance.
Quadro 600(96SP) replaces the old Quadro FX 580(32SP), another big leap in performance.