so what your saying is that the quadro cards will beat the gaming cards doing 3d cad work? i have a 6850 in my computer at home and run solidworks there seamlessly...i have a quadro fx380 in my computer at work and it jumps, skips, and lags. would this be more of a cpu/ram issue then or would you think that has to do with the video card?
I'm going to assume you're serious.
RAM/CPU could be an issue. But the FX380 is so old and slow, that even with the benefits provided by "professional grade" drivers, the 6850 - a much more modern card - will be faster.
The FX380 has 16 cores. The Quadro 4000 has 256 much faster ones. The 6850 has 960/5= 192, still running faster than the FX380. (Divide stream processor count by five to get CUDA core equivalent.)
In that review I linked, the "bonus" from having the pro version of a given video card was a little under 5x. 5 < 12, so there you go.
Not even taking into account VRAM or memory bandwidth. *shudder*
i have a topic going on over at the cpu board also talking about a xeon vs i7-3930 processor. basically it boils down to i want our new computers in the engineering office to have i7-3930 processors...16gb of 1600 ram minimum....and a pair of gtx 680's or 7970's as the video cards....our purchasing depart is wanting to buy us xion qc-e5-2643 processor...16gb of 1600 ram...and a quadro 4000m video card at the cost of 2000 dollars more...which is better for what i need?
The Xeon vs. i7 thing is a wash. They're basically the same, assuming same size cache, clock speed and core count. Some Xeons will support SMP if you want to do dual socket motherboards, of course.
For what you need, I'd probably do it a little differently. Get an LGA1155 server grade motherboard with SAS, drop in a consumer grade i7, and get a Quadro 5000 (not 4000.)
Your purchasing department is probably closer to right though. It sounds like you're trying to build a gaming rig. They want a professional grade workstation with, more than likely, and more importantly, a professional grade onsite support contract. Just for starters, most of the Quadro 4000 boards I see on Newegg have a three year warranty.