NVIDIA Quadro M4000 Review

Apart from the disappointing result with Maxon Cinebench R15, the NVIDIA Quadro M4000 provides significantly better performance across the board than its K4200 predecessor. Despite the identical memory quantity and speed to the previous K5200, the M4000 doesn't quite offer enough to make you wish you hadn't bothered paying for the extra over the K4200 (the K5200 cost more than double the price of the K4200).

Nevertheless, the 8GB of GDDR5 memory is the real killer feature for the M4000. It does have a few more CUDA cores than the K4200, but its abilities really show themselves when applications are dealing with large texture sets, as shown by a few of the SPECviewperf 12 tests. These may only be in the minority at the moment, but the constant demand for increasingly realistic 3D will mean the huge amount of memory in the M4000 will make it a worthwhile investment over the years of its useful life.

Since the M4000 costs about the same as its predecessor has done for most of its lifetime, buying the new card is a no brainer, with the only caveat being if you're running FP64-heavy software. Otherwise, even at a greatly discounted “end of line price”, a K4200 won't be worth the economy over a M4000. We expect to see the NVIDIA Quadro M4000 gracing the majority of mainstream modelling workstations from now on – until its successor arrives.

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Pros:

• Noticeably better performance than the previous K4200 in most applications.
• Twice as much memory as predecessor.
• Faster memory than predecessor.
• Same price as predecessor.

Cons:

• Worse FP64 performance than the previous generation.
• Slightly greater power consumption than K4200.

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