14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday we brought you the new range of professional graphics adapters from Advanced Micro Devices, called AMD FirePro W-Series, and now we can introduce to you the NVIDIA Quadro Kx2 line as well.
After that Quadro graphics driver revealed the approach of the video adapters, we originally expected these product to debut last week or the week before that, at the start of the month (August 2014).
NVIDIA decided to wait, though, until Siggraph 2014, the forty-first international Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Siggraph is taking place between August 10 and 14 in Vancouver, Canada.
That is where Advanced Micro Devices unleashed its aforementioned FirePro W-Series as well.
There are five new NVIDIA Quadro Kx2 video cards, three of them based on the Kepler architecture (GK110/104 GPUs) and the rest on Maxwell (GM107).
That's right, this doesn't mark the debut of some new and improved, groundbreaking graphics processing unit like the GM204. Instead, NVIDIA merely adapted the GPU powering the GeForce GTX 750 (Ti) for professional use.
We'll check out the two most powerful Kepler-based ones first, since they also happen to be the strongest in the new series. Quadro K5200 is the flagship, with a GK110 chip (2,304 CUDA cores, 650 MHz frequency, 256-bit memory interface), 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM (6 GHz), and a TDP of 150W.
The Quadro K4200 is right below it, based on the GK104 chip (1,344 CUDA cores, 780 MHz clock, 256-bit interface) and equipped with 4 GB GDDR5 memory (5.4 GHz). The TDP is of 105W.
The best of the Maxwell-powered adapters is the Quadro K2200. As you may or may not already know, the GM107 possesses 640 CUDA cores, 1 GHz clock, and 128-bit memory interface. The board has 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM at 5 GHz and a TDP of 68W.
Quadro K620 is quite a bit weaker, with a revision of the GM107 featuring only 384 CUDA cores. The 2 GB of VRAM are DDR3, not GDDR5, clocked at 1.8 GHz and managed by a 128-bit interface. Thermal design power is of 45W.
Finally, the Quadro K420 has 192 CUDA cores, 780 MHz clock, and a 128-bit interface handling 1 GB of DDR3 RAM at 1.8 GHz. The TDP is 41W. Its GPU is a GK107 Kepler.
All new NVIDIA Quadro cards can work well in environments where cloud and mobile devices connect to workstations in order to build a broader, more complex workspace. You won't have to keep swapping between running 3D CAD programs, data sheets and, say, videoconferencing.
