RTX 6000 Ada, the professional GPU shows itself, and the price is not for everyone

Nvidia’s new RTX 6000 Ada professional GPU has started appearing in online listings and together with it also the first price indications, which as we could have imagined, remind us how products for professionals are not within everyone’s reach.

The GPU has appeared on some US shops including CompSource and ShopBLT with a suggested retail price of 9,999 dollars, but fortunately both shops have decided to apply a discount on the list price, which on balance allows you to buy it on average around 8,000 dollars. Now the RTX 4090s seem almost cheap, don’t they? Of course, these are products intended for different types of use, so it is not even correct to relate them.

Recall that the RTX 6000 Ada graphics card is Nvidia’s latest professional GPU and is one of the first “prosumer” GPUs to adopt Nvidia’s latest Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. According to PNY’s datasheet, the RTX 6000 Ada is a monster, packing 76.3 billion transistors, 18,176 CUDA cores, 568 Tensor cores for AI-centric workloads, and 142 RT Gen-3 cores for ray tracking. Just think that compared to the Nvidia RTX 4090, the RTX 6000 Ada has 1,792 (10.93%) more CUDA cores. Surprisingly, Nvidia isn’t yet using a fully unlocked AD102 die, which has 18,432 CUDA cores and two more SMs, for the RTX 6000 Ada.

Note that the RTX 6000 sticks to the same limit as 300W TBP (Total Board Power) than the previous generation card, as workstations are more likely to use multiple cards and don’t necessarily want a single 450W card. Nvidia previously stated that the RTX 6000 Ada will be substantially faster compared to the previous generation RTX A6000 (these names are not confusing at all), offering two to four times the performancethanks to the massive increase in CUDA and RT cores.

This design has a very special cooler, with a type of fan designed for compact server and workstation chassis, where the GPU has to manage all of its heat extraction independently: the fan directs the hot air outside of the chassis without relying on the help of the chassis fans. The card measures 27cm by 11cm and features a dual-slot form factor running on a PCIe Gen 4 x16 interface. It features 48GB of GDDR6 ECC memory operating on a 384-bit bus.

If the suggested retail price on shops like CompSource and ShopBLT is accurate, the RTX 6000 Ada will be priced much more than the previous GPU still on sale at around 4,000 euros. If Nvidia’s claim that the RTX 6000 Ada offers two to four times the performance is correct, it could still be worth paying double the price, at least for professional users who need it.