The new NVIDIA Quadro 5000 professional graphics card finally brings the Fermi GPU to the world it was originally designed for: content creators. Even though a whole new line of parts is being introduced it is really the 5000 model that will see the brunt of attention with a modest (!!) $2250 price tag. Performance might lag in gaming (clocks and specs are under a GTX 465) but in the world of CAD, design, animation and more the NVIDIA card has the edge over AMD's FirePro line.

The Fermi-based Quadro cards look to be as powerful as promised and NVIDIA has another great offering for professional developers. The Quadro 5000 in particular beat out the FirePro V8800 from AMD in most of our SPEC testing though it does have a steep price curve for those speed enhancements. Designers that need every last ounce of performance in their trade to get the edge are going to be enticed to make the jump to NVIDIA's latest option also because of the multi-monitor support and improved 3D Vision Pro technology. The battle for professional-level users is ever evolving as software and drivers are iteratively advanced but for today, the NVIDIA Quadro 5000 is the fastest professional graphics cards we have tested.