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

On the previous page, I mentioned that SPEC is an organization that crafts some of the best benchmarks going, and in a similar vein, I can compliment SiSoftware. This is a company that thrives on offering support for certain technologies before those technologies are even available to the consumer. In that regard, its Sandra benchmark might seem a little bleeding-edge, but at the same time, its tests are established, refined, and really accurate across multiple runs.

For the purposes of a workstation graphics card review, we focus on four main tests: general GPU processing, cryptography, financial analysis, and scientific analysis. Some of these tests produce complex results, so those will be displayed in a table rather than a graph.

GPU Processing

For both the single- and double-precision tests, the M2000 and K5000 are effective equals, at least where CUDA is concerned. With OpenCL, the M2000 is much faster overall, especially with the double- and quad-precision tests.

Cryptography

It’s clear from these results that NVIDIA has made great strides with the cryptography performance on its Maxwell-based Quadros. The M2000 makes a complete mockery of the K5000 here – a card that has more often than not outperformed the M2000 in our other tests.

Financial Analysis

The results are quite cut-and-dried here. The Maxwell-based M2000 dominates the single-precision test, versus the K5000, but it falls short in the double-precision test. Maxwell was released with notably decreased DP performance versus the previous generation Kepler cards, so a result like this isn’t surprising.

Scientific Analysis

It looks like we couldn’t finish off our regular performance results without another doozy. Here, the M2000 dramatically outperforms the K5000 in most single-precision and double-precision tests. The newer and higher-end Kepler-based K5200 delivers its own impressive results, although the M6000 chimes in to remind us all that it’s the big dog in NVIDIA’s current Quadro line-up (well, aside from the 24GB variant released last month.)