Nvidia RTX A2000 vs NVIDIA Quadro T1000 Max-Q

The Nvidia RTX A2000 Desktop GPU is a professional graphics card for small workstation PCs. It is based on the GA106 graphics chip, which is used in the GeForce RTX 3050 or GeForce RTX 3060 consumer graphics cards, among others. However, the GA106 only works with 3,328 active shader units, as well as 26 RT cores and 104 tensor units. The VRAM comprises 12 GB GDDR6 and communicates via a 192-bit memory interface. This results in a memory bandwidth of 288 GB/s.

The professional graphics cards from Nvidia offer certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospecting, visualization applications). This results in many advantages over consumer graphics cards.

Compact design and flexibility:

The RTX A2000 is designed in a low-profile form factor, making it ideal for smaller workstations or systems where space is a limited resource. Despite its compact size, the Nvidia RTX A2000 offers considerable computing power.

The graphics card is ideal for 3D modeling, CAD applications, video editing and visual effects where high precision and speed are paramount. Thanks to the combination of CUDA, Tensor and Raytracing cores, the Nvidia RTX A2000 offers significant performance improvements in the areas of real-time rendering and AI-supported image processing.

Energy efficiency and power consumption:

The Nvidia Quadro T1000 with Max-Q Design is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). Compared to the consumer GTX 1650, the Quadro T1000 features less CUDA cores / shaders (768 versus 896). The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. Compared to the normal Quadro T1000, the Max-Q variants are clocked lower and work in a more efficient state. Currently, we know of two variants with different clock speeds and power consumptions (35 and 40 W).

The Quadro T1000 is a mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU116 chip). Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the T1000 integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores. Due to the same boost clock as the mobile T1000, the Max-Q variants can perform similar with sufficient cooling.

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Thanks to the low power consumption, the Max-Q T2000 GPU can be used in thin and light laptops. The used TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.