GeForce vs. Quadro

[L337G33K]

Hi..Whats the difference between Quadro and Geforce.[Fire GL and Radeon for ATI Fanboys].Can a Geforce be used with CAD/CAM/3D Rendering instead of a Quadro ?And vice versa ?

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/256915-3...-gaming-autocad

Which offers the best performance - High-End Gaming PC or Workstation ?

P.S. Forgive me if the question was too n00bish .Please don't flame.

[VaKo]

Quadro cards are optimized to do things like vector processing, rather than texture processing, are better suited to processing large data sets due to more memory and better memory interfaces and will be far better for serious CUDA work. They will be less good at stuff like shader and texture processing as a trade off, so while old games like Quake might run faster on them, for todays gamming stuff the money would be better spent on a SLI setup.

You can certainly use gamming cards for CAD work, they just won't be as fast as a compareable quadro card. This won't really be an issue unless your a proffesional in the field though, I remember using a 3DFX card with Lightwave back in the day and they certainly were never intended for the task but worked well enough for me. A G9600 or higher would be perfectly passable for a CAD setup.

As for a workstation vs high end PC, a workstation is just a machine which has been tweaked to perform better for one task, be it development, data processing, CAD or video editing, where as a high-end PC is just the best money can buy from the consumer market. They are just terms and any deffinition is by neccesity vauge.

[WhollyMindless]

Quadros are generally better validated (tested) and don't update as often (firmware/drivers) as they would necessitate more validation. They also tend to be behind the pure performance curve, sometimes by a significant amount and cost more.

Unless you need to be assured of the accuracy for 3d modeling, a quadro's a waste of a lot of money. Generally only businesses buy Quadro because they don't like surprises. GeForce will generally be faster because most humans only need "good enough" - and good enough can be really fast.

[VaKo]

I would also suspect that Quadro cards user higher tolerance parts when compared to GeForce parts. I have old PNY Quadro cards that use solid capacitors and generally they seem to be built better than the consumer kit.