Graphics Card for CAD workstation, but still decent for gaming

[biff2bart]

Hello,

I'm building up a new CAD station for myself, but I still want to play games on it occasionally and not be punished too severely for having a workstation video card.

This is for Solidworks, which is where I make my money.

Tentative system specs will be:

Intel i7 950
Intel 160GB SSD
WD 1T SATA3 drive
12GB ram
Probably ASUS MB like the PT6 or something similar

OS: Windows 7 64bit Professional

CAD files are stored remotely on a file server.

Of course the big decision is the graphics card. I've used consumer graphics cards before and while they work OK, there are issues with Solidworks, so I have made the decision to move to a workstation card. However, Solidworks' performance is generally driven by processor and ram, not so much GPU dependent, so I don't need a multi-thousand dollar card here...

My question of course is which NVidia Quadro card? I've narrowed it down to a couple of choices and am looking for any ideas here to ensure that I can still game on the machine when I'm not working. Typical games would be FPSs (L4D2 and ME2) and the occasional RPGs like DA-O and SC2. While I'm not an NVidia phanboi, I'm not interested in ATI cards. I simply feel that Nvidia has better driver support.

I will not be overclocking: stability is my prime concern.

I'm thinking perhaps the Quadro 600 or 2000 w/ 1GB ram or maybe even two SLI Quaro 600s? I have a budget for up to a grand for the video cards, but like I said, I definitely won't need that for Solidworks and obviously would prefer to spend less cash than more!

Oh - I should add my monitor setup: one 20" (1600x1200) and one 27" (2560x1440). Obviously the 27" is where I do my work but it will also be the monitor on which I'm gaming, so i have the ability to push a few pixels if the cards are capable

Any help would be hugely appreciated - thanks!

 

[Soccerman06]

I would first check whatever software your using for your CAD program and see if they support gpu acceleration and if they do, get the fastest gaming card. You would probably want to avoid any professional gpus if you wanna play seriously.

Edit:

The latest NVIDIA® Quadro® professional graphics solutions allow engineers and designers to take full advantage of SolidWorks® and interact with complex 3D CAD models in real time. With Quadro, your models are shown on screen as intended without simplifying geometries or lowering rendering quality. Zoom, rotate and manipulate large datasets in real time with ease - without compromising image details or your standards.

So there you go, only quadro series. Up to you if you wanna spend the money.

 

[biff2bart]

Thanks for the reply! The challenge is this: I NEED to have a professional workstation card in the machine for Solidworks. it's not a frame rate issue with Solidworks at all - even the base bottom end $200 workstation card will be fine for Solidworks. The issue is drivers and Z-buffer accuracy. With gaming cards you will "loose resolution" when zooming in, have minute visual collision issues, not be able to pick lines properly and other weird small mistakes that get annoying really, really fast. In terms of pure rendering speed on screen, that's almost entirely CPU and RAM driven, hence why I can get away with essentially the cheapest workstation card possible - for CAD. If I was using 3DS or Rhino or similar, then it's a totally different story and I would want a kick ass workstation card. But for CAD, the most basic card will be good enough. The question is now, how "low" can I go in a workstation card to get decent gaming performance. As you know workstation cards get stupid expensive fast.

 

[T2k]

Look here for comparison - I have here everything from Quadro FX5800 and Quadro 5000 and all the way down, 4000, FX3800, 2000, 600, FX580, FX380, NVS240 etcetc and I can honestly tell that 600 is pretty crappy for anything other than 2D, photo works etc - buy it when you need cheap 10-bit output but otherwise is slow as hell, crippled every way.
First viable alternative is Quadro 4000 w/ 256 CUDA cores etc but if I were you I'd just get a GTX480/580 for the same price or less and use soft-modded drivers.
FYI Quadro 6000 sports GTX480 performance w/ 6GB of memory and costs anywhere between $3,500-$4k, ridiculously expensive for its regular performance. I was debating getting it with my R&D guy - we do a lot of GPU rendering, we could use infinite amount of memory - but then we decided it's just a complete effin' ripoff and went with 5000 and 4000 instead. I don't know Solidworks - we are a high-end 3D shop - but our six-core Xeon 3.33GHz workstations are screaming fast so far (24-48GB memory across the board) and display setup is similar here, one 27" and one 19" portrait per WS so a 4000 or 5000 must be fine for you too.

 

[T2k]

I would first check whatever software your using for your CAD program and see if they support gpu acceleration and if they do, get the fastest gaming card. You would probably want to avoid any professional gpus if you wanna play seriously.

Edit:


So there you go, only quadro series. Up to you if you wanna spend the money.

I bet it's driver restriction and soft-modding can solve it.

 

[96Firebird]

I second T2k's suggestion on getting a high end GTX if you plan on playing any games. Quadros just can't handle them. Although if you really want a workstation card, I have no problems with SolidWorks and the FX 3800. Granted, that card is in the lab computer where I mainly run long simulations and am barely on it, but from what I can tell it gets the job done.

 

[Ben90]

I wouldn't mess around with modded drivers since this card is your source of income. The PNY 4000 seems to be your only bet if you want a single card for everything. It should give you performance between a GTS450 and GTX460, not the most amazing performance, but definitely able to play any game with tweaked settings.

I'm not sure if this is an option since I haven't done it, but maybe someone could see if having a PNY 600 + a consumer card would work. I haven't messed with multi-gpu configurations because of reasons, but if you can choose which card to use to render certain things, this would be a cheap viable option.