The Tests - Quadro 4000, Quadro 5000, FirePro V9800 and FirePro V7800 review

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 13th 2010 | Discuss
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: nvidia amd ati quadro firepro

We tested two Nvidia workstation AIBs, the Quadro 4000 and Quadro 5000, and two AMD workstation AIBs, the FirePro V7800 and FirePro V9800, on four benchmarks: CineBench 11.5, SpecViewPerf 11.0, Redway 3D demo, and Unigine Heaven (on OpenGL). We tested the boards on Intel i7 6-Core, 12 threads @ 3.34 GHz system running Windows 7 64-bit. The results are shown in the following charts.

This procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase (by renderbaron), which measures the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode. The performance depends on various factors, such as the GPU processor on your hardware, but also on the drivers used.

SPECviewperf measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL application programming interface. The benchmark’s test files, called viewsets, are developed by tracing graphics content from actual applications.

RedWay 3D Turbine contains a benchmark, which measures the raster and ray tracing performance of your hardware.

The Heaven benchmark is a GPU benchmark based on the advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp.

We took all the scores and added them up and produced a summary chart.

For the ViewPerf scores we took the average of all the scores, and for the Redway 3D we divided the scores by 100 to normalize them.

What do we think?

In terms of raw power the Nvidia Quadro 5000 is a clear winner on a perf per dollar basis (using our total score and the prices in the table) we found the Nvidia Quadro to be the winner.

Although game enthusiasts would never make a buying purchase on the basis of power consumption and care only about maximum performance, enterprise and SMB customers will take power consumption (and the associated fan noise) into consideration. Therefore we calculate the Pmark for the boards.

Pmark

The PMark

Where:

  • Performance is Total Score
  • Price is expressed in US dollars
  • Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

So Nvidia takes it all, raw power, performance per dollar, and even the Pmark. A clean sweep across all benchmarks.

TABLE 1: Workstation AIB characteristics. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Quadro 4000 Quadro 5000 FirePro V9800 FirePro V7800
Core Clock 950 MHz 1.2 GHz 850 MHz 700 MHz
Memory Clock 1.4 GHz 1.5 GHz 1.15 GHz 1 GHz
Dedicated Memory 2 GB GDDR5 2.5 GB GDDR5 4 GB GDDR5 2 GB GDDR5
Power 142W 152W <255W <150W
MSRP $700 $1,800 $3,099 $650
Drivers 260.78 260.78 8.773 8.773

FIGURE 2: Viewperf 11 benchmark results for the Quadro 5000: 80—200% improvements in many—but not all—cases. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 3: cineBench benchmark results. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 4: SpecViewperf benchmark results. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 5: Unigine Heaven benchmark no AA. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 6: RedWay 3D turbine benchmark. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 7: Unigine Heaven benchmark 4X AA. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 8: combined benchmark score for the boards. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 9: Performance per dollar. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

FIGURE 10: Pmark for workstation boards. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

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