As you know, graphics cards these days are extremely expensive. So imagine my surprise when I saw one for sale in Dell UK with a price tag of £13,866. It was not a mistake, it was a real graphics card. And it was five years old.

Now, I know what you're thinking, this must be a special, super-special card for such a price: the Quadro QV100 has a Volta-powered GV100 GPU and 32GB of HBM2 VRAM with a 4096-bit wide memory bus.

This particular model was launched in March 2018, but the Volta lineup started nine months earlier with several Tesla models; while the Quadro cards were targeted at professional content creators and others, the Tesla was aimed at the HPC ( high-performance computing) market.

All of the older Quadro cards (Nvidia discontinued the model names a few years ago) were perfectly usable for gaming. [But in December 2017, Nvidia released the Titan V graphics card, which, despite the GPU giant's repeated claims that it was not for gaming, nevertheless shook up PC Gamer benchmarks. The results showed that the Titan V was, on average, about 13% faster in 4K games than the then top dog, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

The GV100 card is still used in many supercomputers around the world thanks to its superior FP64 throughput and its ability to handle matrix operations on the newly introduced tensor core.

Since Volta, Nvidia has developed a total of five GPU architectures, and the RTX 4090 will eclipse the Quadro QV100 in most areas, except for FP64 computation. To cover this segment, you can use the previous generation A100 40GB card, which you can get on Amazon for just £7,040. That's almost half the price of the Quadro that Dell is trying to sell.

If it weren't so ridiculously expensive, would the QV100 be worth getting just to mess around with, after all, since none of the Volta GPUs are supported by Nvidia's DLSS API, despite having lots of Tensor cores, It's just a slightly faster GTX 1080 Ti for gaming, which means something like the RTX 4070 would be much better.

What is really puzzling is the price of £13,866 that Dell is asking for the Quadro QV100. With an MSRP of $9,000 at launch, it looks like the world can't get enough of Nvidia's GPUs for AI and HPC, but you'd have to be seriously desperate to get your hands on this one.