AutoCAD & Revit Video Card Recommendation

[goobernoodles]

What's a good middle of the road card for AutoCAD and Revit? The architect in my company is using an FX1700 and is saying that his machine has been bogging down when he has multiple drawings open. His machine has 20 something gigs of memory, so I've got to assume it's the VRAM he's running out of. The rest of his machine is nearly new (i7 and a lot of memory).

No real budget but I'm hoping to keep below or around 500.

 

[joshhedge]

When I was doing work placement with an aerospace engineering firm, I was using workstations with similar specs to what you stated above but with Quadro K5000s, although some had lower spec Quadro K2000 which should be within your stated price range.

Worth noting I was working on AutoCAD and Solidworks, not Revit though. I'm pretty sure it is a CUDA optimised application as it is from Autodesk, correct me if I am wrong though.

http://www3.pny.com/NVIDIA-Quadro-K2000-P3273C365.aspx

Available at Amazon for $426 - http://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Quadro-.../dp/B00BLTE7DA

 

[Cerb]

A K2000 (make sure you get the right one, D or not) should be a great upgrade. The FX 1700 should be several times weaker, in GPU power alone, and the K2000 has more RAM and quite a bit more RAM bandwidth.

I wouldn't be surprised if the GPU is actually struggling, or the drivers, with a G80, as well as limited VRAM likely being an issue, especially with Revit. Fermi was a huge upgrade, even the slowest (Quadro 600) for 3D AutoCAD.

Also, you should be able to use MSI Afterburner (seriously) to verify real-time VRAM and GPU time usage, before you go buy, just to make sure. IE, have it run in the background, then bring up the interface after it's started to get sluggish, and see if GPU usage and/o VRAM have been getting maxed out, and/or if VRAM usage has been going up and down a lot. I'm not 100% sure that it will work with that GPU and drivers in use, but it should. Would be kind of a bummer to get the new video card, if it actually was CPU time being eaten up by keeping too many views and linked files updated .

 

[goobernoodles]

A K2000 (make sure you get the right one, D or not) should be a great upgrade. The FX 1700 should be several times weaker, in GPU power alone, and the K2000 has more RAM and quite a bit more RAM bandwidth.

I wouldn't be surprised if the GPU is actually struggling, or the drivers, with a G80, as well as limited VRAM likely being an issue, especially with Revit. Fermi was a huge upgrade, even the slowest (Quadro 600) for 3D AutoCAD.

Also, you should be able to use MSI Afterburner (seriously) to verify real-time VRAM and GPU time usage, before you go buy, just to make sure. IE, have it run in the background, then bring up the interface after it's started to get sluggish, and see if GPU usage and/o VRAM have been getting maxed out, and/or if VRAM usage has been going up and down a lot. I'm not 100% sure that it will work with that GPU and drivers in use, but it should. Would be kind of a bummer to get the new video card, if it actually was CPU time being eaten up by keeping too many views and linked files updated .

Indeed. I'll give that a shot before pulling the trigger. Thanks for the suggestions.