If you've been following the graphics card market over the past few months, you're
no doubt painfully aware of the price inflation brought on by the cryptocurrency mining boom.
It's all but dead at this point, thankfully, but budget cards like the GT 1030 are still
selling for upwards of $75, and that's for the craptastic DDR4 version.
So today, we're looking at a more affordable option.
Meet the Nvidia Quadro 2000, a $20 graphics card that works in most full profile PCs.
Is it worth a Jackson?
Let's find out, shall we?
Before I get into the specs of the Quadro, I want to talk about another graphics card
that may be more familiar to you.
This is the Geforce GTS 450, a midrange card released in September of 2010 at an MSRP of
$129.
The GTS 450, more specifically its Fermi-based GF106 core, served as the basis for the Quadro
2000, which launched at the end of that year for a hefty price tag of $600, though that
was considered affordable for a workstation card.
Aside from driver support, something I'll go more in-depth on later, the primary difference
from the GTS 450 lies in clock speeds.
In order to hit its 62W TDP, the Quadro cuts the core clock by 20% and the memory clock
by 28%; not bad considering the GTS 450 is rated at a much higher 106W.
The rest of the specs are the same; both cards pack 192 CUDA cores clocked at double the
core speed, so you can think of them as having 384 cores if you'd like.
Because of the relatively high core count, the Quadro 2000 is able to take the crown
for fastest Fermi GPU not to require a 6-pin power connector, which is the main reason
I bought it.
There's also 1GB of GDDR5 connected via a 128-bit bus, a standard configuration for
the time.
That said, this is the slowest GDDR5 I've ever seen; the first GDDR5 card, the Radeon
HD 4870, runs its memory at around the same speed as the GTS 450, and Nvidia's first
outing with it, the GT 240, is only a little slower at 3.4GHz effective.
It's clear the Quadro's VRAM clocks so low due to power consumption, but I have to
wonder if it needed to be slowed down that much.
Physically, the Quadro 2000 is a full-profile single slot card measuring 7 inches long,
making it perfect for most minitower prebuilt PCs.
Curiously, there are two variants of this card; mine has a shorter PCB with the cooler
sticking out past the end, with the other having a longer PCB and a rectangular cooler.
Both variants include a dual link DVI-I port as well as 2 DisplayPort 1.1a ports that can
be adapted to HDMI 1.3a if necessary.
You won't be running any 4K monitors with this card, but anything up to 2560x1600 will
work at 60Hz, or in my case, 1080p at 144Hz.
Now before I get into the benchmarks, I want to talk about my experience with drivers.
Being a workstation card, the driver set is different from what you get on Geforce cards.
The latest version for the Quadro is 377.83; these are dated January 2018 but are missing
the DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.6 support that's included with the latest Geforce drivers,
as well as optimizations for versions of Windows 10 newer than the Anniversary Update.
I wanted to include DX12 as part of my testing, so I set out to get the 391.35 drivers working,
as that's the final release for Fermi cards.
The installer didn't recognize the Quadro, so I had to get creative.
First I tried manually installing the card as a GTS 450 from Device Manager, but that
only kind of worked.
I got my DirectX 12, but this method failed to set up OpenCL, CUDA, and PhysX support.
I wasn't particularly bothered by the first two, but PhysX was another thing I wanted
to play with, so this wasn't going to work either.
Next I attempted to edit the inf file so the installer would detect the card, the instructions
for which are down in the description.
That did get the installer to proceed, but the end result was the same as before.
At that point, I had to bring out the big guns: BIOS mods.
The goal was to change the device ID of the card to that of the GTS 450 so I wouldn't
have to mess with the drivers themselves.
Initially I used GPU-Z to dump the BIOS, NiBiTor to edit it, and NVFlash to apply it to the
card.
Problem is, that didn't work.
At all.
Device Manager still showed the card as a Quadro 2000 with the device ID to match.
After a few minutes of scratching my head, I stumbled on a guide for BIOS modding Geforce
cards to function as Quadros.
The next few hours were spent trying to make sense of the very technical guide and getting
it to work in reverse, but I finally figured it out.
The drivers now installed without a hitch and the card registers as a GTS 450 in Device
Manager.
I've included a link to the ROM of the modded BIOS in the description so you don't have
to figure it out yourself.
With all that out of the way, the benchmarks you're about to see were all run on the
modded card with the 391.35 drivers, so you get a better picture of what this dated card,
and by extension, the Fermi architecture, is capable of.
First, we have 3DMark.
It recommended the Sky Diver test for this card, so I ran that first and got a graphics
score of 3696.
For whatever reason 3DMark complains about lack of VRAM for Fire Strike despite the technical
guide claiming a requirement of 1GB, which we have.
It ran with no issues regardless, scoring 1252 points in the graphics test.
Next I wanted to test Time Spy to see if the Quadro can handle a DX12 test.
It can….sort of.
The first run crashed during graphics test 2, the second scored unusually low, the third
was a little better, the fourth a lot better, and finally, the fifth was the same as the
third.
It was clear the 1GB of VRAM was a big problem for Time Spy, not surprising considering the
technical guide specifies a minimum of 1.7GB.
Moving on, I threw Unigine Valley on the Extreme HD preset at the card, where it struggled
and delivered only 8.8fps average; not too surprising given the demands of the test.
The last synthetic test was Fluidmark, a PhysX test.
The Quadro spit out 33fps average, good for 1997 points, which happens to be the year
I was born.
The first actual game I tested was Dirt 4, and at 720p low it can be considered playable,
but the visuals on display are a lot worse than you'd expect for the framerate you
get.
I recommend playing Dirt 3 or Rally instead.
Next up is a game I've been playing a lot lately, Killing Floor 2.
At 720p medium it feels great to play, and if you can handle lower framerates 900p is
achievable too.
Quake Champions, an arena shooter recently gone free-to-play that you should definitely
try if you're an FPS fan, was more of a struggle; I had to drop the render scale to
80% at 720p to achieve playable performance, but once I did it was more or less fine.
Up next is Metro Last Light Redux; performance is ok at 900p but it's clear the Quadro
struggles when things explode.
Gas Guzzlers Extreme, an overlooked gem of a combat racer, is somewhat playable at 1080p
low, though I prefer 900p personally.
Oh, and LGR voices Duke Nukem, so it's got that going for it.
<LGR INTENSIFIES>
To avoid comment spam, here it is: GTA V.
At 900p the Quadro pulled off smoother framerates than I expected, staying above 30fps at all
times.
Not bad Quadro, not bad.
I wanted to include a modern OpenGL game on this list, so here's Doom.
It's not very fun to play, with horribly inconsistent frametimes dragging you down
the entire time.
That's not to mention the 60% render scale required to even get this level of performance.
As a bit of a change of pace, I tried playing back H.264 video from Youtube at 1080p60,
and though it drops a single frame every few seconds, it's still plenty watchable.
1440p or 4K are off the table however, so you'll need to use the CPU to decode those.
Overall, the Quadro 2000 doesn't do too badly in the tests I ran; in the cases where
performance isn't up to snuff, you can drop the resolution or settings a little more to
bring the framerate back up...y'know, as long as you're not playing Doom.
But I'm not done with the benchmarks quite yet.
Earlier I mentioned DirectX 12 on this card, and wanted to dive into more depth than just
Time Spy.
Verdict: it's crap.
Take arguably the least demanding DirectX 12-enabled title out there, Civilization VI,
for example.
In DirectX 11 mode, it runs fine, especially because you don't need high framerates to
comfortably play.
DirectX 12?
Won't even start, and looking at the renderer log this is caused by the card lacking Tier
2 resource binding.
Wikipedia has a handy table of DirectX 12 capabilities and sure enough, Fermi only supports
Tier 1, same as Haswell and Broadwell IGPs.
I tried The Division next, and while it didn't explicitly mention resource binding, it too
fails to start on Fermi, Haswell, and Broadwell.
Same story with Forza 6 Apex, it errors out with the same issue.
I was about ready to give up on DX12 completely, but I gave it one last shot with Halo 5 Forge.
To my surprise, after complaining about the fact that I don't have 2GB of VRAM, it launched
and rendered without any errors.
With the framerate cap set to 60 it stutters enough to make the game unplayable, but with
a 30fps cap things look better.
That's all fine and good, but Halo's not the kind of game you want to play at 30fps,
especially in multiplayer.
From what I've tested, Fermi is just plain bad at DX12; sure, some games will launch,
but the feature set required for most isn't there.
That's not a huge problem though; there aren't many DX12 exclusive games, since
the majority of games that support it also support DirectX 11, and you're likely not
going to be playing those games on a $20 card anyway.
This card is best suited to eSports titles, indie games, and older classics.
With that said, all of the tests thus far were run at stock clocks, which are pretty
low even for Fermi.
How far can you push this little guy?
Well, after several hours spent in MSI Afterburner and Kombustor, I have the answer.
I hit 776 MHz on the core and 1674 MHz on the memory, for gains of 24% and 28% respectively.
You do get the option in Afterburner to overvolt the core, and I was able to achieve around
873MHz at 1V without touching the memory.
The temperatures and fan speeds were getting uncomfortably high from pushing the poor thing
so hard, so I've left the voltage at the stock 912mV with the previously mentioned
clocks.
Before I could start retesting in earnest I had to take care of an issue that popped
up as soon as I started overclocking.
I alt-tab out of fullscreen games during downtime frequently, and doing so will eventually result
in the card getting stuck at its idle clocks of 405MHz core and 324MHz memory, and as you
can imagine that wrecks performance.
I spent several hours troubleshooting that, messing with power management settings and
whatnot, before eventually giving up and applying my overclock as a BIOS flash.
I set the idle power state to the same settings as the load state, so if it changes state
mid-game I won't notice.
I'm sacrificing a lot of power efficiency when not gaming, but that's the price I
pay for having to use the latest drivers.
With that taken care of, on to the results.
In Sky Diver my efforts were good for a 29% uplift to the graphics score, roughly in line
with the increase in memory bandwidth.
Fire Strike picked up an extra 27%.
Unigine Valley saw a similar improvement.
The score in Fluidmark jumped by a smaller but
still great 23%.
More impressive than anything else, though, was the overclocked Quadro's showing in
Doom.
Not only does it show better than linear scaling in average fps, the lows are more than double
what they were at stock.
You can actually play it comfortably with the overclock, and while it's still pretty
bad in the visual department, it's a huge step up from stock.
Metro showed an increase more in line with Fluidmark, making it hold up better during
the high stress parts of the benchmark.
GTA V's improvements were more subtle; the average framerate improves nicely but the
lows are only marginally better.
With the 60fps cap in Halo 5 the stutter is still there and playability is just as bad,
but with the 30 fps cap the drops you'd get at stock are much less frequent and much
less severe.
With a little patience you can squeeze between 20-30% more performance out of a Quadro 2000,
certainly nothing to sneeze at.
Bear in mind that if you put this card into a prebuilt, you'll need to be careful not
to overload your power supply, since those can deliver less than 300W more often than
not.
As a final test I tried the same 1080p60 video from before, and instead of dropping frames
every 5 or 6 seconds, it now drops one every 15 seconds or so.
Not much of a difference either way.
At the end of the day, you could certainly do worse than a Quadro 2000 for the money.
It won't run every game out there, but the ones it does run, it runs reasonably well.
But should you actually buy one?
In most cases, no, definitely not.
As much as I like it, it's going on 8 years old, and with no new drivers coming it's
only going to fall further behind as the years roll on.
If your power supply has a 6-pin connector or two, you have a much larger pool of cards
to choose from.
That said, $20 doesn't go very far when it comes to graphics cards, and even spending
5 to 10 dollars more gets you into HD 7750 territory, a much better choice than a Quadro
2000.
If you absolutely cannot spend more than $20, the card to get is the Radeon HD 8570.
This is essentially a proto-R7 250 running at R7 240 clocks.
Since it's an OEM card found primarily in Dell PCs, you can pick up it for even less
than the Quadro most of the time.
It still has 1GB of VRAM, and slow DDR3 at that, but even so, it performs similar to
or better than the Quadro while still receiving driver updates from AMD.
It's also low profile so you can put it in smaller prebuilts if you need to.
It's simply a superior card in most respects.
There's also a GDDR5 version of the 8570, but it's a lot less common and you'll
have to pay a premium for it.
Anyway, the only time the Quadro 2000 makes sense is if you meet all of these requirements:
a) you want a card with no 6-pin power connector, b) you have a motherboard that has issues
with cards from the Radeon HD 5000 or Geforce 600 series and later, and c) you have a case
that takes full profile cards.
Otherwise, get something else.
I hope you enjoyed seeing what this card can (and can't) do, and as always, thanks for
watching, and I'll see you next time.
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