NVIDIA Quadro 4000 by PNY 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express Gen 2 x16 DVI-I DL, Dual DisplayPort and Stereo OpenGL, DirectX, CUDA, and OpenCL Professional Graphics Board, VCQ4000-PB

Video card was high quality, works great, and solved my problem. Very happy.

I bought this card to use mainly with Maya and Mudbox. I had been using a Quadro FX 1700 (512 MB) and I expected better. And I got that, and more. Maya is much snappier working with scenes of 500,000 polygons (63 skinned, textured models). I built the scene using the FX 1700, but it took a noticeable amount of time to select a model or move the camera. With the Quadro 4000 (2 GB) everything moves smoothly. I am sure there are limits on how large a scene you can be manage even with this card, but I haven't tried to create something that breaks it.On my older Quadro card, I had to sacrifice some gaming performance to get decent performance on Maya 2011. Cards like the GT 9800 (and the 325M I have in my laptop) work, but you can tell the difference when you select components (particularly vertices or edges). On a Quadro, you get the selection faster and more accurately, especially when working in the perspective view. On consumer cards, sometimes the wrong thing gets selected, and often there is a defined lag between when you click and when the selection is highlighted.However, on the Quadro 4000, I get great gaming performance, for example running Left 4 Dead 2 at 1920x1080 with high detail with a good frame rate rather than having to reduce the resolution at run lesser detail that I had to do with the old card. I could run games full bore with the GT 9800, but I had performance issues with Maya (even Maya 2009).I am well pleased with the card. My PC had only a 350 Watt supply, this card works well with that, so I didn't have to swap out to a larger power supply. I don't have but a single hard disk in this machine (lots of network storage), so I expect that helps on the power consumption, I did notice that even after an hour of gaming I never once heard a fan switch on high rate, which, while I understand the need for this, I still find annoying.Given the price range, I expect this will become a popular card for those that need serious performance with professional level 3D programs.

Would not recommend for high performance games, but is a great product, and ran the games that I play with ease.Good graphics, and fit well into my tower with very little noise.

I did a lot of research on Qaudra Fermi Series and their semi twins GeForce GTX 400 & 500 Series. On the papers, they look almost identical. But the key difference is , GeForce is engineered for FPS (Frame rate in games), while Quadro is engineered for display complex model in 3D programs. Plus all 3D programs have designated driver for Quadro series, and will not help you if you have a software issue with unsupported GPU card. GeForce GTX 400 series has some display issues with 3Ds Max at the time I was doing my research(6 months ago), I'm not sure it got solved or not. Gaming cards tent to have display issue like chappy rotation, missing lines and crashes, if you have complex model or a large scene.Majority of rendering engines are GPU base now, so you might not need this mid range Quadro if you don't deal with modeling much. You still need a quadro card for setting up the scene. Nowadays the common setup for rendering pro is, get a entry level quadro fermi card for display and modeling; and get one or two Geforce GTX card for rendering. GeForce GTX are in PCI slots but not connected to any monitors. And only install Quadro driver for display. Rendering engines will seek out all available GPU on your machine.Bottom line, if you're a 3D pro who do a lot of modeling then this card will save you time and headache = money. If you're setting up a mini render farm, then Geforce GTX is more cost efficient. If you're like me who do a bit of everything, modeling, rendering, texturing and gaming (this card does pretty well on HD games), then this card is perfect for you. It does get pretty hot, make sure your machine have a good air flow. I have two 80mm fans (with fan speed control) to keep it cool.