Maxwell Quadro For All: NVIDIA Quadro M2000 Workstation Graphics Card Review

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by Rob Williams on May 5, 2016 in Graphics & Displays

To those who’ve been waiting for a mid-range Maxwell Quadro to come along: your wait is over. To help wrap up its Maxwell-based lineup, NVIDIA’s Quadro team has released the ~$500 M2000. This card is largely targeted at CAD users and those with lighter 3D design needs, and promises to be much more efficient – and faster overall – than its predecessor. We gave the card a thorough test to see just how true that is.

Page 1 – Introduction

Since the release of NVIDIA’s first Maxwell-based Quadro last spring, M6000, many folks have been patiently waiting for a mid-range variant to arrive. Well, arrive it has.

As covered in our news post from a couple of weeks ago, NVIDIA’s Quadro M2000 is special in that it’s going to be the final Maxwell-based Quadro to be released. Going forward, we have Pascal to look forward to. As cards featuring that architecture are just getting off the ground now, I wouldn’t anticipate seeing Pascal-based Quadros released for quite some time – especially where an M2000-equivalent is concerned.

NVIDIA considers the M2000 to be a replacement for the K2200 – released in the summer of 2014 – but its performance actually puts it closer to the higher-end K5000. Since the M2000 will retail for under $500 and the K5000 debuted for $2,249 in 2012, it highlights just how powerful today’s mid-range Quadro offerings are.

NVIDIA Quadro M2000 Workstation Graphics Card

Compared to the outgoing K2200, the M2000 has 20% more cores, delivers up to 1.8 TFLOPs of processing power (vs. 1.3 TF), and improves memory throughput by about 30%.

M2000’s target customers include those working with CAD or lighter 3D projects. NVIDIA notes that this latest card has what it takes to deliver great experiences in SolidWorks, Siemens NX, and PTC Creo. As with the other Maxwell-based Quadros, the M2000 fully supports NVIDIA’s Iray renderer, which is available to a number of design suites as a plugin. I took an in-depth look at Iray and its plugins in December.

To help modernize the M2000 a bit, NVIDIA has chosen to offer 4x DisplayPort connections in lieu of a combination of DP and DVI. Those who need DVI should be able to find an appropriate adapter in the box (it’s important to check before purchase).

The M2000 might sport a modest aesthetic, but it still has what it takes to drive high resolution displays, which includes up to 4x 4K/60Hz, or single 5K/60Hz. Even if you go lower than 4K, the card’s display limit remains 4 (perhaps not a big surprise given the four outputs).

NVIDIA Quadro Cores Core MHz Memory Mem MHz Mem Bus TDP Price
Quadro M6000 24GB 3072 988 24576MB 317GB/s 384-bit 250W ~$5,000
Quadro M6000 3072 988 12288MB 317GB/s 384-bit 250W ~$5,000
Quadro M5000 2048 861 8192MB 211GB/s 256-bit 150W ~$2,000
Quadro M4000 1664 773 8192MB 192GB/s 256-bit 120W ~$800
Quadro M2000 768 872 4096MB 106GB/s 128-bit 75W ~$500
Quadro K2200 640 1000 4096MB 80GB/s 128-bit 60W ~$400
Quadro K1200 512 1058 4096MB 80GB/s 128-bit 45W ~$300
Quadro K620 384 1058 2048MB 29GB/s 128-bit 41W ~$150
Quadro K420 192 876 1024MB 29GB/s 128-bit 41W ~$130

As covered above, NVIDIA’s slapped a $500 SRP on its Quadro M2000, although as always, street price is expected to be lower. While the card isn’t available for purchase as of the time of writing, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the card settle in at closer to $400 not long after launch. AMD’s main competition in this area is the FirePro W4300, which came out this past winter. That card is designed for low-profile PCs and currently sells for $300.

It’s worth noting that the M2000 doesn’t require the use of a PCIe power connector, thanks to its modest TDP of 75W. Being a mid-range card, you shouldn’t expect the card to break past 60°C too often, although it’s designed to handle higher temperatures if it’s installed in a more size-restrictive chassis.

Other notable features the M2000 brings includes support for NVIDIA’s Mosaic and nView technologies, as well as the company’s NVENC video encoder and HEVC decoder – the latter of which can handle video at up to 8K resolution.

Performance Testing The Quadro M2000

On the following pages, we’ll be putting NVIDIA’s latest Quadro through a gauntlet of real-world and synthetic tests, utilizing apps from Autodesk, Adobe, SPEC, SiSoftware, and a handful of others (including light gaming tests for good measure).

All tests are run at least twice to produce an accurate result, and if for some reason an odd result creeps up, we do a third run. In the case of this particular review, no tests had to go that route, as most of the benchmarks are very good at delivering similar results with each repeated run.

Our Windows 7 Ultimate x64 test OS has a couple of key Windows services disabled (Search, Defender, Firewall, and Update), as well as Aero. During all testing, the display is kept in 4K resolution, with two exceptions: SPECapc Maya 2012 and SPECviewperf are run with a 1080p resolution. Further, Vsync and G-SYNC are disabled through the NVIDIA Control Panel.

Our test system is as follows:

Techgage Workstation Test System
Processor Intel Core i7-5960X (8-core; 3GHz)
Motherboard ASUS X99-DELUXE
Memory Corsair Vengeance 32GB (8x4GB; DDR3-2133 11-12-11)
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X 12GB (GeForce 353.30)
NVIDIA Quadro M6000 12GB (Quadro 352.86)
NVIDIA Quadro M2000 4GB (Quadro 362.13)
NVIDIA Quadro K5200 8GB (Quadro 353.30)
NVIDIA Quadro K5000 4GB (Quadro 353.30)
AMD FirePro W4300 4GB (FirePro 15.201)
Audio Onboard
Storage Kingston HyperX 3K 480GB SSD
Power Supply Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid 1300W
Chassis Cooler Master Storm Trooper
Cooling Thermaltake WATER3.0 Extreme Liquid
Displays Acer XB280HK 28″ 4K G-SYNC Monitor
Et cetera Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

With that all covered, it’s time to jump right into the test results. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to add the results from our Quadro M5000 testing to this review, although that card is in a much different league from the M2000. I did include results for AMD’s recently-released FirePro W4300, as it’s the closest competitor to the M2000 we have on hand.

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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