Workstation, Quadra or Geforce

Rexido · May 17, 2015

Hi,

Im hopefully start at a cgi school next semester. And im starting to plan my new workstation.

Im trying to figure out witch graphic card i should pick, im thinking to spend around $3000 on complete build.

PNY NVIDIA Quadro K2200 or PNY NVIDIA Quadro K4000

Geforce - 970, 980.

Or something else. All thoughts are help full

Best Regards,

Petter

Suffokation · May 17, 2015

Despite what people will say, workstation cards are not worth it if you do not have hundreds of thousands to spend. The physical differences between, an M6000 and a Titan X for example are minimal. They both feature fully fledged GM200 cores with 12GB's of memory each. The price different however, is 5x greater. Quardo's offer better warranties and maintenance, but you would need to have a Titan X die 5 times for the M6000 to make sense. M6000 cores are also binned to make sure that they last for longer periods of time. Quadro's are aimed at companies that require massive compute power and factor power savings and overall longevity more than performance here and now. A GeForce card makes more sense for someone who is using it for school, or in your matter CGI.

If you want the best for you dollar right now, the GTX 980 is a far better option. Please do some research for yourself and compare the cards specifications when comparing GeForce to Quadro.

The Quardo K4000 is a GK104 chip, which was used in the recent 700 series. These chips are very good and are still now, very competitive compared to GM204 (What is found on the GTX 980). However, the K4000 chip has been severely gimped and features only 768 Cuda cores and the full 3GB of memory. Too put this into perspective, the 980's GM204 has 2048 Cuda cores and they are based on a more powerful, and more efficient architecture. That is a full 3x more Cuda cores and an extra 1GB of memory. All of this is made even worse when you factor in that a K4000 is (on average) $200 more expensive than the GTX 980 depending on the model you choose.

As for the "Something else". Radeon cards are known to be better at mathematical computing and overall workstation use than a GeForce card. It may be worth it too look up some benchmarks for FirePro cards (FirePro and Radeon use different architectures) and see what you can get for your $3000 there.

@Rexido