NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Workstation Edition vs RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell: 32 or 48 GB

RTX PRO 4500 vs RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell, the decision in four rows

The choice between the NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Workstation Edition and the NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell with 48 GB is first a choice of memory: 32 GB at 200 W against 48 GB at 300 W, in the same slot space. The larger card also has 1.5 times the memory bandwidth, a third encoder and decoder, and MIG stated in its datasheet. If the largest model, scene or dataset fits 32 GB with room to work, the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition does the job at two thirds of the board power.

NVIDIA datasheets 5108623 (April 2026), 5349550 (June 2026) and 5192801 (April 2026); "about 40 GiB" is the budget of the 48 GB card by our sizing rule.

The first two rows are the subject of this page. The 72 GB card shares the datasheet of the 48 GB card, and the memory size is what separates them there; the Server Edition is a different, passive card with the same 32 GB and 10,496 CUDA cores. Both come up again where they decide an order.

32 GB vs 48 GB by the model files that fit

By our sizing rule a card has a budget for model weights plus KV cache of 0.9 times the memory the driver reports, less 3 GiB: 25.7 GiB for a 32 GB card and 40.0 GiB for a 48 GB card. For the reported memory we assume the scale of the 96 GB card, on which the driver shows 95.6 GiB; the driver on the delivered card decides. The file sizes are those of the publishers' own files on Hugging Face, read 10 November 2026.

our arithmetic from file sizes on Hugging Face, read 10 November 2026, against budgets of 25.7 and 40.0 GiB; nothing measured.

"Tight" marks a file whose weights are above our budget and within 0.9 times the memory the driver reports: we do not plan on it. "Does not fit" marks weights above that limit, which is 28.7 GiB on a 32 GB card by the same scaling. In the other rows the remainder is what the KV cache can use, and it sets how much context and how many parallel requests a card holds. Gemma 4, Ministral 3 and Qwen3.8-27B are published under Apache 2.0; for Devstral Small 2 and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B check the licence before commercial use.

Image models show the same step. Qwen-Image in BF16, an Apache 2.0 model, has a diffusion model file of 38.05 GiB. By our arithmetic against 0.9 times the card memory, that file fits a 48 GB card if the text encoder is unloaded or kept in system memory; on a 32 GB card the file alone is too large and runs only with partial loading from system memory, which is slower. Our article on ComfyUI on the RTX PRO 2000, 4000 and 4500 covers the files that fit 32 GB.

The last row of the table marks the limit of this comparison. Once the weights pass about 40 GiB, the question is 48 or 72 GB and no longer 4500 or 5000. By the same arithmetic a 72 GB card has a budget of 61.5 GiB, which holds Gemma 4 31B-it in BF16 with 3.3 GiB to spare. Our comparison of the RTX PRO 5000 with 48 GB and 72 GB deals with that step.

Bandwidth, cores and the measurements that exist

NVIDIA datasheets 5108623 (April 2026) and 5349550 (June 2026); ratios are our arithmetic. TFLOPS are peak rates at boost clock; AI TOPS are effective FP4 figures with sparsity.

The datasheet figures rise by 27 to 50 per cent from one card to the other, and the board power rises by 50 per cent. Both AI TOPS figures are theoretical FP4 values with sparsity from the same generation, so they can be set side by side, but they are no measured rates.

A controlled test of the two cards against each other is not among the sources we use. Puget Systems' roundup of 18 December 2025 measured each card against the Ada card of the same number, which gives two different baselines: the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition was 50 per cent faster than the RTX 4500 Ada in Blender Cycles and 73 per cent in V-Ray GPU, the RTX PRO 5000 (the text we read does not say whether with 48 or 72 GB) 50 and 35 per cent faster than the RTX 5000 Ada. Those percentages do not rank the two Blackwell cards.

Blender Open Data, read 10 November 2026, comes closest. For Blender 4.5.0 it shows a median of 10,928.75 samples per minute from 7 submissions for the RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell and a median of 8,486.57 from 17 submissions for the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition; for Blender 5.2.0 the medians are 11,691.00 from 4 and 9,185.89 from 5. That is a ratio of about 1.3 in both versions. The data is crowd-sourced, pools OptiX and CUDA runs and comes from different systems, so read it as an indication. For language models no acceptable published measurement of tokens per second exists for either card. Published tests of the larger card are collected in our RTX PRO 5000 benchmarks article.

We supply both cards across the EU; send us the largest model or scene and the number of seats and we reply with the card that fits and a written quote within one business day.

200 W against 300 W in the same outline

Both cards are 4.4 in high and 10.5 in long, about 112 by 267 mm converted, take two slots at full height and are actively cooled. Both have one PCIe CEM5 16-pin connector on a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, and NVIDIA's quick start guide lists the same adapter from two 8-pin PCIe cables for both. By the datasheet dimensions, a tower that takes one card mechanically takes the other.

The difference is 100 W per card. Two RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition cards draw 400 W and four draw 800 W; two RTX PRO 5000 draw 600 W and four 1,200 W. NVIDIA publishes no power-supply figure for either, so add the board power to the load the machine already has and compare the sum with the rating its maker gives. The quick start guide also ties system memory to GPU memory: at least as much, with twice as much recommended, which is 32 and 64 GB per RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition and 48 and 96 GB per RTX PRO 5000.

Two RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition cards hold 64 GB at 400 W in four slot widths, one RTX PRO 5000 holds 48 GB at 300 W in two. The pair remains two separate GPUs of 32 GB each, and NVIDIA's datasheets list no NVLink for either card. Whether one model or scene can be spread over two cards is a property of the application; where it cannot, the single 48 GB card is the order. Towers with several cards are described on our pages to buy an RTX PRO 4500 workstation and to buy an RTX PRO 5000 48 GB workstation.

MIG and vGPU

MIG is documented for the larger card. The RTX PRO 5000 datasheet states "Up to 2x 24 GB" and "Up to 1x 48 GB", and NVIDIA's MIG guide, in its copy of 4 November 2026, lists the card with two instances on Linux, with driver 575.57.08 or later, vBIOS 98.02.73.00.00 and the display mode set to compute with DisplayModeSelector 1.72.0 or later.

For the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition the documents leave the question open. NVIDIA's MIG guide lists an RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell without naming the edition; the Workstation Edition datasheet does not mention MIG. Where two isolated instances on a workstation card are the reason to buy, the RTX PRO 5000 is the card with the documented path.

Neither card is on NVIDIA's vGPU supported-GPU list of 2 October 2026. Of the cards named on this page the list holds the 72 GB version of the RTX PRO 5000, from release 20.2, and the RTX PRO 4500 Server Edition, from release 20.0. Our article on MIG and vGPU on RTX PRO and Ada cards has the table for the whole range.

Three encoders against two, display rows and drivers

The RTX PRO 5000 has three NVENC and three NVDEC engines, the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition two of each. NVIDIA's Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix of 16 October 2026 lists AV1 and 4:2:2 encoding and an unrestricted number of sessions for both. For a recording or transcoding system the third engine is the documented difference.

Both cards have four DisplayPort 2.1b outputs and drive four displays. Their datasheets list different configurations: 4 × 3840 × 2160 at 165 Hz or 2 × 7680 × 4320 at 100 Hz for the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition, and 4 × 4096 × 2160 at 120 Hz, 4 × 5120 × 2880 at 60 Hz or 2 × 7680 × 4320 at 60 Hz for the RTX PRO 5000. Plan a display wall with the rows of the card's own sheet. Both cards are on NVIDIA's RTX PRO Sync page of 15 October 2026 and in the sync table of the 621.14 release notes, and Dassault's SOLIDWORKS 2026 certification list, read 10 November 2026, has rows with desktop workstations for both; a row certifies one computer model with one card and one driver, and the list separates neither the 48 GB from the 72 GB card nor the two editions of the RTX PRO 4500.

On drivers the two do not differ. Both run on the NVIDIA RTX Enterprise Production Branch driver, both are listed in the current releases 621.14 (R620), 597.30 (R595) and 582.99 (R580), and both have compute capability 12.0 with FP4 support in their fifth-generation Tensor Cores. One oddity concerns the 48 GB card: NVIDIA's download pages for 597.30 and 582.99 omit it and a search by product returns only 621.14, although the release notes of both versions list the card. That is a gap in the download record; the release notes show that the card is supported.

Names that lead to wrong orders

• RTX PRO 4500 with 48 GB. It does not exist. The Workstation Edition and the Server Edition both have 32 GB.
• RTX PRO 4500 Server Edition. A passive single-slot card with 165 W and 800 GB/s for rack servers, with three encoders and three decoders and vGPU from release 20.0. Its figures are not those of the workstation card; see the page to buy the RTX PRO 4500 Server Edition and its specs.
• RTX PRO 5000 laptop GPU. NVIDIA's RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell Generation for laptops has 24 GB and 10,496 CUDA cores, the core count of both desktop RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell cards. A benchmark or a certification row for it says nothing about the desktop card with 48 GB and 14,080 cores.
• RTX PRO 5000 Server Edition or Max-Q. NVIDIA lists neither, as our article RTX PRO 5000 Server Edition: which cards exist shows.

When to order the 32 GB card and when the 48 GB card

• Models and scenes up to about 25 GiB. The RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition: buy the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell, figures in the 32 GB spec article.
• Several GPUs in a tower with a fixed power budget. The RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition, at 200 W per card.
• Weights between 26 and 40 GiB, or long context on a 24 GiB model. The RTX PRO 5000 with 48 GB: buy the RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell 48 GB.
• Two isolated instances on one workstation card. The RTX PRO 5000, with MIG on Linux.
• Three encoder and three decoder engines on one card. The RTX PRO 5000.
• Weights above 40 GiB, or vGPU. The 72 GB version of the RTX PRO 5000.
• 24 GB is enough and slots are scarce. One step down is the single-slot RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell: see the page to buy the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, its specs and RTX PRO 4000 vs RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell.

Larger builds are weighed in our comparison of several RTX PRO 5000 or 4500 against fewer RTX PRO 6000, and the whole range from 4 to 48 GB is mapped in our NVIDIA RTX workstation GPU guide; the two cards against GeForce are in RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell vs RTX 5090. If your case sits between two rows, describe the software, the data sizes and the tower, and we quote one card or both for comparison.

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