The Quadro 4000 ($1,199 list) is the lower-high-end model in Nvidia’s line of workstation video cards. It’s positioned between the Quadro 2000 and the Quadro 5000, and delivers performance generally in keeping with that position. Though you’ll want to stick with the Quadro 5000 if you’re determined to make every frame count, the Quadro 4000 is still effective across a broad range of professional applications, and a special version of the card for the Mac adds some extra platform-agnostic attractiveness.

As is true of the other cards in Nvidia’s consumer and workstation lines alike, the Quadro 4000 is based on the company’s relatively new Fermi architecture. This manifests itself in 256 CUDA parallel processing cores; they’re matched up with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM for the frame buffer, which runs across a 256-bit memory interface and results in bandwidth of 89.6GBps. This memory, however, does not support error-correcting code (ECC); if you need to be sure that each and every bit is in place, you can find ECC on the Quadro 5000 and its $5,000 bigger brother, the Quadro 6000. Nvidia claims the Quadro 4000 can process up to 890 million triangles per second.

Like other Fermi cards, the Quadro 4000 supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, and Shader Model 5.0, in addition to Nvidia’s proprietary Mosaic feature (for spreading applications across as many as eight displays) and 3D Vision Pro stereoscopic 3D technology.  (For this you may connect the necessary 3D glasses via USB, or install an optional bracket on the card that adds a three-pin DIN port; just know that going the latter route will force you to give up a second expansion slot.) In Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS5 and CS5.5 video editing package, you’ll also additional speedy boosts; the software’s new Mercury Playback Engine was designed exclusively to take advantage of Fermi’s capabilities.

You’ll only need one free PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slot for the Quadro 4000; it uses a sufficiently thin fan–heat sink unit that will not block a second slot the way the Quadro 5000 or Quadro 6000 will. (The Quadro 4000 will take full advantage of the newer and faster PCIe 2.0 standard.) The card measures 9.5 inches in length, which is still short enough that it should fit in almost any case with no issue. The PC version of the Quadro 4000 sports one dual-link DVI-I port and two DisplayPort jacks, which lets you connect either one or two 2,560-by-1,600 displays simultaneously. On the Mac-oriented card, you’ll find only two output ports: one DVI and one DisplayPort. In both cases, Nvidia rates the Quadro 4000’s TDP as 142 watts.

In our CineBench R11.5 OpenGL rendering test, the Quadro 4000 managed 58.75 frames per second (fps); we saw similar results in our SiSoftware Sandra GPGPU tests, with the card attaining 342, 317.9, and 375.5 megapixels per second using OpenCL, Compute Shader, and CUDA methods respectively. In both cases, the Quadro 4000 lands almost precisely between the Quadro 2000 and the Quadro 5000, leaning just a bit toward the latter.

This relationship continued to make itself evident when we ran the Quadro 4000 through the SPECviewperf 11 benchmark suite, which measures cards’ performance on eight different high-intensity professional applications. The biggest leap we saw came with the Maya 3D compositing test, when run at 1,920-by-1,080 resolution: The Quadro 2000 turned out 36.99 frames per second (fps) , but the Quadro 4000 jolted it to 76.18fps. In most other cases, the gaps between the cards were much smaller, and weighted toward the Quadro 5000 in the EnSight and Siemens NX tests. Interestingly, the Quadro 4000 came out with the highest score—but just barely—in a cluster of close LightWave results: 53.23fps, with the Quadro 2000 and Quadro 5000 coming in with 51.05fps and 53.17fps respectively. When we enabled full-screen anti-aliasing, all the way up to 64x, the card’s speed dropped precipitously; it’s not ideal for quite that level of detail. Also, with the exception of LightWave, where the frame rates were again very close, the Quadro 5000 pulled out the goods more readily at 2,560 by 1,600, regardless of whether we enabled multisampling.

Though it’s ostensibly in a tricky position between a card that offers truly stellar performance and one that’s more primed for value, the Quadro 4000 more than holds its own. You will want to think twice about it if you’re dependent on broad-scale anti-aliasing. But in most other circumstances, unless your work regularly puts you in situations where every last frame really does count, it’s a robust enough graphics solution to justify its high, but not highest, price—and our midrange workstation video card Editors' Choice award.

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