Nvidia is about to launch its new RTX 6000 graphics card for serious work only, and it’s going to be expensive. The new workstation card apparently appeared in store listings on sites like ShopBLT and CompSource, according to video cardzwith prices coming in at a business cost of $7,378 to over $8,000.
Announced in September, the RTX 6000 is powered by the same Ada Lovelace architecture as Nvidia’s new RTX 40XX series gaming offerings. We didn’t get pricing information for the 6000 at the time, but competing top-end workstation cards like AMD’s Radeon Pro W6800 with 32GB of VRAM can cost less than $4,000 in comparison. Even Apple’s overpriced W6900X doesn’t go beyond $6,000.
To be fair, the new RTX 6000 has 48 GB of GDDR6 ECC RAM and is based on specifications published by Leadtek, it has more than four times the single-precision performance at about 91.1 teraflops compared to 22.2 on the W6900X. So with that kind of arsenal, Solidworks users might be able to load all of the objects.
That’s the same amount of memory as Nvidia’s current Ampere-based (and confusingly named) RTX A6000 has. The A6000 costs less than $7,000 at some retailersat a big premium compared to its gaming twin, the $1,000 RTX 3090. That gap is actually quite similar between both the $7,000-plus RTX 6000 and Nvidia’s new enormous impressive RTX 4090 gaming GPU for $1,599.
Although the RTX 4090 with 24 GB of VRAM has half the amount of memory as the RTX 6000, they are almost comparable in other specs such as memory bandwidth and both tensor and ray-tracing cores. Also, it’s harder to differentiate the products now that Nvidia has decided not to use the workstation’s Quadro branding on the 6000.
But most importantly for engineering firms, the RTX 6000 apparently needs less power at a maximum of 300W compared to the 4090’s sloppy 450W to keep up with its expensive ECC RAM. So upgrading will technically be easier for some workstations that aren’t ready for that overhead. What won’t be easier is actually affording to do it.