When it comes to CAD comparisons the best I've found are at
CADALYST. It would be nice if they had reviews more frequently or if they gave a wider range of scores to help differentiate the products more. But what they do say is quite useful information.
The ATI Fire line is generally right in the middle of performance and generally right at the low end of price (meaning quite good price/performance ratio). Honestly except for the most demanding complex projects just about any up to date video card will do fine for most people.
Generally LCDs are too small for CAD work and generally they aren't as accurate with straight lines. But Trinitrons (and similar Aperature Grille monitors) aren't known for good straight lines either - yet for gamers who don't care about true lines they are quite popular. Instead for good lines you usually find them in the Shadow Mask monitors - which are a dying breed. CADALYST has this to say about the debate "We?re often asked which is better: LCD or CRT. CRTs offer higher resolutions, truer colors, and lower prices. LCDs produce a crisp image at their native resolution, take up less space, and use less power. Again, your eyes are the best judge of which type works for you."
I don't think there has been a recent dual CPU computer review there. The last I remember said this: "As anticipated, when working on a single drawing in a single session of AutoCAD, the dual-processor configuration boosted overall performance, as measured with our C2001 v3 benchmark, by only 2%?4%, certainly not worth the effort.... When running the CADALYST Labs benchmark within two simultaneous sessions of AutoCAD that were tiled vertically onscreen... the final results were worth the trouble. The dual-processor configuration proved to be 68%?74% faster at completing the benchmarks than the single-processor setup." So basically if you are going to run two things at once then yes it is useful (but then you could always just buy two cheaper computers) - if not then don't bother.
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