The Quadro 5000 up-close
To test the new Fermi Quadro cards NVIDIA sent along a sample of the Quadro 5000 to run through our battery of tests. Let’s take a quick look at the card itself before jumping into the benchmarks.
The Quadro 5000 is physically smaller than the GTX 480 but is similarly sized to the GTX 470/465 cards in the consumer market, as you might expect based on the specifications.
Here is one key to the surprisingly lower power consumption quote of the Quadro 5000 – it only requires a single 6-pin power connector. This is interesting since the GeForce GTX 465 that was running a similar GPU but with less memory, still required a pair. This might have something to do with the clock speeds of these GPUs – we’ll see on the next page.
The back of the card features a heat plate that covers part of the 2.5 GB of frame buffer.
A single SLI connector rests on the top the of the Quadro 5000 to support adding one additional card to your workstation while the SDI port allows the user to add in other I/O ports for higher end video processing.
The external connectors on the card include a dual-link DVI output, dual DisplayPort outputs and a 3-pin DIN for connecting a 3D transmitter.
As we start to take the card apart you can see that the design of this heat sink assembly is much more intricate than the GeForce options.
The top shroud is easily removed with a handful of clips and under it we find the heatsink on the GPU and the relatively quiet fan used for cooling it.
The heatsink itself is definitely a high quality piece and is very dense using a combination of copper heat pipes and aluminum to get the job done.
Removing the heatsink reveals what looks to be a standard GF100 GPU.
The GPU is a new revision of the GF100, A3, but is still the same 3.0 billion transistor beast we have loved and questioned in the consumer space.
We are seeing a 512 CUDA core processor reduced to 352 cores due to heat, power and cost requirements.
