NVIDIA Quadro M6000 Graphics Card Review

The crew at Techgage have the NVIDIA Quadro M6000 pro graphics card in house for a little review action today.

What NVIDIA’s GeForce TITAN X does for gaming, its Quadro M6000 does for workstations. As the company’s first Maxwell-based Quadro, the M6000 has a lot going for it: an impressive performance-per-watt rating, support for 4x 4K/60 displays, and despite its 7 TFLOPs performance, requires just a single 8-pin connector.

So a professional card that costs 4x Titan X price but performs no better in most software in the review? Doesn't seem like a good investment.

kasakka said:

So a professional card that costs 4x Titan X price but performs no better in most software in the review? Doesn't seem like a good investment.

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The value for most users/businesses comes in that the Quadro drivers are validated and certified for many professional applications, in which the standard GeForce drivers are not.

But aside from that, yeah, the pricing of the Quadro line is a pure sham. Especially since Maxwell lacks Double Precision.

DejaWiz said:

The value for most users/businesses comes in that the Quadro drivers are validated and certified for many professional applications, in which the standard GeForce drivers are not.

But aside from that, yeah, the pricing of the Quadro line is a pure sham. Especially since Maxwell lacks Double Precision.

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I think nvidia could use some competition in this niche market ECC memory and specific drivers are nice and certainly useful for some but I'm surprised that it doesn't even pack more VRAM or something. Makes the price really shocking to us gamers especially now that the 980 ti is out lol. And wtf I didn't realize that even the Quadro Maxwell cards lacked DP...

kasakka said:

So a professional card that costs 4x Titan X price but performs no better in most software in the review? Doesn't seem like a good investment.

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How do you know it performs no better? Are you basing this on the benchmarks in that article? There are definite noticeable improvements when you're working on these cards versus running a benchmark. It's unfortunate that they basically reviewed this like a common gaming card.

The only place I would consider running a benchmark would be for modern diverse compute work loads.

quadro = paying for support

martinmsj said:

How do you know it performs no better? Are you basing this on the benchmarks in that article? There are definite noticeable improvements when you're working on these cards versus running a benchmark. It's unfortunate that they basically reviewed this like a common gaming card.

The only place I would consider running a benchmark would be for modern diverse compute work loads.

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The benchmarks they did seemed very much like what working on them would be like. If it can't encode video faster or render a 3D graphics frame what is there to justify the price?

jojo69 said:

quadro = paying for support

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quadro = paying for support = that if you're considering this kind of card, you really don't need anyway. And BTW, WTF is "support" ? fucking over priced hardware, thats what!


PS. I use "pro" cards. and i have many years of valid experience with their highly "explicitly written drivers and support".

It's not "support" in the "how do I plug in a video card?" sense, it's support in the "no questions asked replacement if there's even a hint of a problem with it" sense. There aren't many consumer card vendors that'll offer that, even if you pay them for some sort of extended RMA service (in my experience).

uhuh, i'm glad you're happy with your "extra support" with its "no questions asked" replacement. My world doesn't seem to even remotely reflect this. And even if it did, at 4x the cost it'd be hardly worth that privilege.

Any with half a brain knows they are all the same shit. Just restricted to suck more money out of "professionals" because they get limited and forced to do so. Supply driven market anyone?

The big difference between the Geforce and Quadro cards will show up in OpenGL CAD benchmarks.

Go look at the Siemens NX results under Specviewperf 12.
The Titan X got 7.37 fps. The Quadro M600 got 170.9 fps. That's only a bit more than 23 times faster.
For Solidworks: Titan X gets 51.71 fps, Quadro M6000 gets 137.9 fps. Over 2 1/2 times faster there.
PTC Creo: Titan X gets 42.08 fps, Quadro M6000 gets 100.56, so over twice as fast there.

Isn't that a big enough difference for you?

Geforce drivers are crippled and don't work well for professional OpenGL applications. Autodesk is DirectX, not opengl, so you probably won't notice big performance differences there. Other apps use CUDA, so a Geforce may be fine for those too.
These pro cards are much better in certain areas. They are worth it for certain people and certain usages.

At least it looks cool

kasakka said:

The benchmarks they did seemed very much like what working on them would be like. If it can't encode video faster or render a 3D graphics frame what is there to justify the price?

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It's not. You have to be working many hours with these cards unfortunately to notice how much of a big difference they make versus consumer video cards. You'll spend many hours working in your programs. This review helps nobody. It feels like proper reviews of these cards don't exist anymore.

As far as encoding, video cards help in very specific use cases and even then they are not worth the price of a Quadro card nor the 980 GTX. ( I work with premiere pro.)


As far as support goes, at my job we're an HP house. We pay more for these cards because we purchase the HP Quadros that have been validated for our workstations. When something happens and we require a part, we have the part overnight AM. The nice thing about HP parts like the Quadro's is that they inherit the support and warranty purchased with our systems. Moreover, this is how it works in the corporate/enterprise. We don't just update drivers cause we can, they're updated when the manufacture sends out an alert about a specific issue or we have a specific issue that the driver address.

Having said that, I would not convince anyone to buy a top of the line Quadro personally unless they want a replica of their workstation at home to work from home. Even then, I'd recommend team viewer over that.