To just phrase it another way for ppl who dont quite get it:
nVid, as mentioned above, cant be buggered making multiple chipsets for their cards. However, nVid can be bothered heading up a driver development team for highend3d OGl implimentation on their chipset .. so it can run more than games, and fill a fairly tasty highend market segment (us). Driver RnD costs a bit, and so does the highend market in general - the card (Quadro's) competes well w devoted highend card performance, so they price it in same park.
The notion of chipsets with 'latent' capacities (most in the drivers used, not in hiden wires) is not so new - intel (as i understand it ...) fabs its CPU die on the same line, a 733 CPU is made together, and on the same wafer sometimes, as the 1.13's .... they need to fill the cheaper market bins, so they under-rate the capacity of the CPU to lower speed for market (and hence(ish) we find that we can clock up our processes beyond spec, 'cause the line that yielded the processor actually has the potential to produce 1.13's, but in lower yields at the top end: higher CPU speed yields increases as they refine the fab process, but they will be same fab line they used to produce CPU for the lower speed ratings - its just more materially cost-effective.) Similar kind of thing was noted for IDE controllers and their capacity to go RAID after a little mod.
The Quadro's have a slightly greater clock on their subsystems cf to their gamer brethren, this i believe is because they take the cream of the yields for the quadro chipsets, and perhaps slightly better rated memory. One can o'clock their 'gamer' chipset to match these quadro speeds if wanted. Doing the mod may automatically o'clock your gamer chipset to quadro, which may not be as easily handled by the gamer subsysts ... thats where a worry may exist, you may even zap your card, but you can get geforce tweak utils to turn it back down post-mod, or you can cool your card etc, buy one that has better rated ram (like Winfast's).
Thats my conception of the theory behind the praxis. Please correct/add-to me if ppl see otherwise.
Cheers,
Campbell
