Nvidia Quadro 2000

Though it’s not the least-expensive video card in Nvidia’s workstation line, the Quadro 2000 does have a reasonable price ($599 list) and capabilities for those who need professional graphics but not a maximum number of bells and whistles to go along with it. The card ably fulfills its general purpose, packing enough oomph to excel at everyday computer-aided design (CAD), digital content creation (DCC), or medical applications. But those in need of more intense capabilities for animation and video work, particularly at higher resolutions, may need to consider a more powerful (and thus pricier) model.

The Quadro 2000 is based on Nvidia’s Fermi architecture, and is equipped with 192 CUDA parallel processing cores. Accompanying these is 1GB of GDDR5 RAM running over a 128-bit memory interface, and offering 41.6GB of memory bandwidth. (Unlike the top-tier members of this family, the and the Quadro 6000, this card does not use error-correcting code (ECC) memory.)

As is true with other Fermi cards, DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, and Shader Model 5.0 are all supported, as is Nvidia’s stereoscopic 3D technology, though because there’s no DIN port you’ll need to connect your 3D glasses via USB. Another function on the Quadro 2000 is Mosaic, which lets you spread a single application across as many as eight displays. Plus, Adobe’s support for Fermi in its Mercury Playback Engine means you’ll see additional speed gains in the company’s and CS5.5 video editing software.

Installing the Quadro 2000 requires only a single free PCI Express (PCIe) slot—the card uses a thin fan–heat sink unit—and supports the faster PCIe 2.0 standard. Because the card measures only seven inches in length, it should fit easily into practically any case. Like other cards in the Quadro line, this one sports a single dual-link DVI-I port and two DisplayPort jacks so you can connect up to two 2,560-by-1,600 displays at once. The Quadro 2000’s TDP is rated at a lean 62 watts.

(Note:  If you find the Quadro 2000 off-putting because using two monitors with it requires at least one to connect via DisplayPort, Nvidia provides another solution by way of the Quadro 2000D. This card is equipped with two DVI-I ports, which Nvidia claims aids its use in grayscale diagnostic applications due to support for 10- and 12-bit pixel packing and DICOM calibration, but its hardware and that of the 2000 are otherwise identical.)

The Quadro 2000 delivered fine results in our generalized performance tests. It returned an average of 44.56 frames per second (fps) rendering an OpenGL scene in CineBench R11.5; and managed 155.38, 138.7, and 160 megapixels per second in the SiSoftware Sandra utility’s GPGPU benchmark using OpenCL, Compute Shaders, and CUDA respectively.

When running the SPECviewperf 11 benchmark suite, the Quadro 2000 produced the strongest single-sampling results in LightWave 3D (51.05 fps), SolidWorks (39.6 fps), and Maya (36.99 fps), all at 1,920 by 1,080 resolution. With full-scene anti-aliasing enabled, all the scores dropped noticeably, though LightWave and SolidWorks showed the most resiliency through levels up to 32x. (In no test was the Quadro 2000 even moderately passable with 64x multisampling.) LightWave, SolidWorks, and Maya remained strong performers at 2,560 by 1,600 with no multisampling, though the last dropped off quickly as additional samples were added.

With an attractive price and solid, if seldom spectacular, performance across a range of professional applications, the Nvidia Quadro 2000 is a more-than-serviceable midrange workstation video card. You can spend considerably less on a Quadro 600 (they’re available for less than $200); if you need even better rendering rates you can get them with the Editors' Choice , which bestows all the same benefits as this card, but with moderately more robust hardware and a substantially higher price ($1,199 list).

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