I just received my new machine:

Intel Xeon Processor E5-1650 v3 6 Core HT, 15MB Cache, 3.5GHz Turbo
32G 2133MHz DDR4 (4x8GB) RDIMM ECC
Nvidia Quadro K5200 8GB

I'm having an issue where this machine is rendering SIGNIFICANTLY slower than my desktop:

Intel Core i7-3770
16gb
AMD Radeon HD 7800M

With just a simple grid in the scene, the Quadro takes about 3.5 seconds to render in the Render View whereas the AMD takes about .5 seconds.

What's going on here? Do I need to specifically change settings to utilize the Quadro correctly?

Thank you,
Caesar

Actually render view uses mantra, therefore it utilizes your CPU, so quadro does not accelerate the rendering operation. But still, something feels wrong because your Xeon CPU should be faster than your i7 in any case, even at single threaded operations. If this is a certified workstation like hp, dell or similar, I would contact their support. If not, then my first suspect would be component firmwares and software drivers.

Thanks tinyparticle - I will look into that

that Xeon cpu should give you little faster render speeds, it has 6 physical cores compared to i7 which has 4 physical cores.

I7 IS 3.5 Ghz where as your Xeon is 3.2 GHZ, but they both have turbo scaling which puts the GHZ difference to only 100HZ so in conclusion it is absouletly not normal to have such different render times.

What is the difference between the machines in a proper render, something that takes at least minutes? Those sort of minuscule startup differences could maybe be because of antivirus checking your mantra executable before letting it launch for example.