PNY NVIDIA RTX A4500 Professional Graphics Card Review

The NVIDIA RTX A4500 makes sense. At first glance, it looked like an unnecessary complication of the professional range, but after testing you can see the niche it is intended to fill. The A4000 is primarily focused on visualisation, whereas the A5000 and above are aimed at ultra-high-end visualisation and GPU compute. But you pay a massive premium for this additional capability.

The A4500 is more of a jack-of-all-trades. It's even better at visualisation than the A4000, but is a bigger step up with GPU compute. You get 31 per cent more of this for 26 per cent more money compared to the A4000. This makes it a much better value GPU compute card than NVIDIA's higher-end professional cards, unless you need the most possible compute you can fit into one machine. The low temperature at full performance also implies that the A4500 should be able to cope with running at close to 100 per cent for extended periods.

This makes the buying decision fairly clear. If you're only doing live visualisation, the NVIDIA RTX A4000 remains the mainstream professional GPU of choice on a cost-performance basis. But if your work will involve regular use of the accelerator for GPU compute duties, the A4500 will give you more FLOPS for your money. That is, until the NVIDIA Ada generation filters down from the ultra-high end.

The PNY NVIDIA RTX A4500 is available from Scan for £1,439.99.

Pros:

• Massive GPU compute capability.
• Healthy 20GB memory.
• NVLink 3.0 enables two cards to share memory for 40GB total.
• Runs cool under load.
• Competitive compute power for the money.
• Majority of visualisation performance still available when multi-tasking.

Cons:

• The NVIDIA RTX A4000 is better value for pure visualisation.

KitGuru says: The NVIDIA RTX A4500 offers better visualisation performance than the A4000, as you would expect, but it is head and shoulders above on GPU compute for only £300 extra. It's a great choice if you run both visualisation and GPU compute workloads regularly, but the A5000 is beyond your budget.

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