NVIDIA Quadro P Series

Inventor of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), NVIDIA has been producing cutting-edge graphics for almost 20 years. Most of those graphics end up in the GeForce line of cards that power the best, most immersive gaming experience available.

Yet the GPU's ability to work on lots of information concurrently, besting what's on offer from the latest CPUs oftentimes by an order of magnitude, means that it is an optimum solution beyond gaming. This is where professional GPUs come in, helping scientists solve problems, power self-driving cars and conduct a form of modern artificial intelligence known as deep learning.

It is inevitable that with such rich GPU heritage, NVIDIA is well positioned to meet the needs of these new, emerging markets, and its Quadro series of graphics accelerators have been widely implemented in workstation computers designed for CAD, CGI and digital content creation.

Today's Quadro GPUs use the latest Pascal architecture also present in the GeForce 10-series gaming cards and Tesla solutions optimised for servers. As Quadro GPUs need to span a large market with varying needs of performance and power, NVIDIA currently produces seven P-series cards, and we list their pertinent performance details in the following table.

Analysis

There is something for every workstation user, with the headline NVIDIA Quadro P6000 almost 20x as powerful as the entry-level P400. The cost increases with the amount of performance on offer, understandably, and eagle-eyed readers may well be able to pick out the GeForce equivalents based on the specs alone. For example, the P5000 is very similar to the GeForce GTX 1080 while the P6000 is much akin to the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

A few features do separate these Quadro cards from their GeForce cousins. Typically, Quadros feature more memory - there is a whopping 24GB on the P6000 - and longer warranties. Additionally, not shown, the supporting software is exhaustively tested with the applications that are intended to run on workstations, meaning regular GeForce drivers may not have the compatibility or certification to run with, say, SolidWorks, Creo, Blender, et al.

Multiple cards are often installed into a large workstations or servers, and it's possible to install up to 10 into a standard-sized server box. More typically, however, workstations, featuring up to two Xeon CPUs, will have access to one or two cards.

The Quadro cards ape their GeForce brethren with respect to cooling, too, as the P6000, pictured above, looks very similar to the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition card. This is no bad thing as that cooler keeps to a dual-slot form factor.

Moving on down, cooling becomes simpler on the lower-wattage parts, with single-slot heatsinks available on the Quadro P2000, for example.

NVIDIA also understands that these professional graphic cards, whilst optimally employed in a desktop computer, are increasingly needed in laptops for in-field work. This is why the Quadro P-series GPUs are also available in approved notebook workstations.

The Quadro P3000 is only available in mobile form, and the other two have similar specifications to their desktop counterparts. Importantly, the trio offers NVIDIA's multi-monitor nView technology as standard, meaning that multiple additional monitors can be attached if the laptop workspace is too limiting.

These mobile Quadros offer the same level of software support and certification, as well, and Scan Computers, as a premium NVIDIA partner, has Quadro GPU Cards in both the desktop and mobile version in stock today.