Technical help with Nvidia cards (top end stuff)

[matt_fsr]

Not sure if anyone here can point me in the right direction, so here goes.

I'm looking at speccing up a real high end workstation, think dual Xeon's with 128GB RAM here folks.

I'm wondering what GPU to go for, whether I should stick with the trusted but eye-wateringly priced Quadro range, or to go for something like the Titan Z?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-253-MS

The Titan is obviously *only* £1k, whereas we have some systems here with the now slightly ageing but perfectly capable Quadro 5000, which was close to £2k purchase price at the time.

It looks like the number of CUDA cores on the Titan should mean it'd destroy an equivalent Quadro card, but can anyone point me to reasons why or to some more in-depth technical information about the differences in the cards range? Google isn't being particularly helpful for me on this.

Much thanks.

 

[mrwolf]

the drivers for the Quadro range are specifically designed and tested for all the high end Hollywood-producing type software that workstations use. The question really needs to be asked in reverse - what software do you want to run? If you are spending £20,000+ on software then £2000-£6,000 on a graphics card is not such a big deal.

 

[matt_fsr]

Fair point on the drivers, I'm aware you can't get the 'Quadro' drivers to run on a standard Nvidia card.

It's more a case of University research, and I'm not totally convinced that anything we have will specifically require a Quadro card. Packages I know will need to be run include Terrascan, Geovisionary, Lecia Cyclone, ArcGIS and GoCad.

The Titan Z may even be slight overkill, but this kind of workstation tends to kick around and get intensive use for 6-7 years, it's not something that needs replacing on a regular basis.