It seems that the last few generations of GPUs have been swelling in size, especially more high-end models. We’ve certainly found it more difficult to find the right parts to build small, compact professional workstations. Then, almost out of the blue Nvidia introduces the RTX A2000, a low-profile workstation card where space and power are in strict competition.
Not a Quadro
You’ll notice that this GPU does not have the word “Quadro” in the name. So officially this isn’t a Quadro professional card, but part of the RTX series of consumer cards. At least by name. However, Nvidia sells the A2000 as a workstation card and a closer look at the spec sheet proves that this is no gaming card.
How Fast?
The A2000 offers 8 teraflops of full-precision performance. This is provided by 3328 CUDA cores and 6GB of ECC GDDR6. All of this for only 70W of power use, which is quite remarkable.
It offers the latest generation of ray tracing hardware, with as much twice the per-core performance compared to the first RTX cards. Nvidia’s machine learning tensor cores are into their third generation as well, bringing a staggering amount of machine learning to this little card. While it’s not the most powerful professional card, it’s got more than enough under the hood to service the vast majority of workstation users. The biggest limitation is the paltry 6GB VRAM allocation, so anyone who needs more than that should look at the larger and more expensive options in the range.
Half-height, Double-wide, and Many Connections!
The size of the A2000 might be a little deceptive. While it’s half-height, it’s still a double-slot card. The good news is that this offers good cooling and space for connectors. You’ll find four DisplayPort 1.4 ports. That makes the A2000 perfect for any workstation user who wants many monitors and that’s going to include many modern software suites that allow for their UIs to be spread across all that real estate.
Who Should Buy an A2000?
The A2000 is clearly not suitable for heavy lifting when it comes to data analysis or handling large datasets. However, users of software like Blender, Autodesk 3ds Max, and any other 3D design software that can leverage GPU power will get a serious kick out of the A2000, compared to the previous generation of low- to mid-range Quadro cards with similar RAM allocations.
