Need good CAD/Professional card.

[Smoblikat]

So im building a computer for a friend and his career is CAD, drafting, photoshop, basically rendering and professional use. Im looking for a viddeo card that wont break the bank (sub 350$) But nvidias offerings are non existant under that price range, same with ATI. Would a GTX 480 do well as a professional graphics card or do i REALLY need to get oen designed for CAD and such?

 

[96Firebird]

For an entry level workstation card, you can get the Quadro 600 for $170 from Newegg. I use it daily for SolidWorks and it does pretty well, only has trouble with REALLY large assemblies. That is the only program I use it for though. I have a GTX 460 1GB at home and the Quadro is much better in terms of performance when it comes to SolidWorks, so I would try to stick with a workstation card if there will be no gaming at all.

 

[3DVagabond]

You might check around and see if there's a Geforce card that can be flashed to accept the Quadro drivers. Consumer cards performance with CAD apps. is really bad because the drivers aren't optimised. You can end up with random crashing when certain features are used, etc...

 

[Stuka87]

Yeah you don't want a consumer card if you are doing CAD work. There is a reason Quadro's are so heavily used. And to a growing extent, AMD's FirePro's. But nVidia has more software support.

Some software requires a Quadro in order for certain features to be unlocked. A GeForce simply won't work in those cases.

 

[kevinsbane]

So im building a computer for a friend and his career is CAD, drafting, photoshop, basically rendering and professional use. Im looking for a viddeo card that wont break the bank (sub 350$) But nvidias offerings are non existant under that price range, same with ATI. Would a GTX 480 do well as a professional graphics card or do i REALLY need to get oen designed for CAD and such?

What kind of CAD are we talking about here?

 

[Smoblikat]

What kind of CAD are we talking about here?

I have no idea..............i dont know anything about this sort of stuff. So a quadro 600 would be better than a GTX 480?

 

[kevinsbane]

I have no idea..............i dont know anything about this sort of stuff. So a quadro 600 would be better than a GTX 480?

Depends. If it's Autodesk AutoCAD (and any vertical products based on it, ie Civil 3D) then no; the GTX 480 will be better.

I have no experience with how Quadro works with other CAD products.

 

[cantholdanymore]

You have a couple of options from both NV and AMD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...nvidia&x=0&y=0

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...on=amd+firepro

Best one will depend on the particular software your friend will be running.

Personally I use the V4900 for PS because of the 10bit color support.

 

[DrBoss]

From my personal experience i've found "CAD / Graphic professional GPU's" (ie Quadro, Fire, etc) to be a complete waste of money. These GPU's are marketed as a necessity for architectural workstations from Dell and other manufacturers. Sales people are always quick to point out the the Quadro or Fire gpu's are "certified by Autodesk"..... i don't get it. My experience leads me to believe this is all a marketing scam to get you to buy high priced hardware. If someone can explain to me the difference between a CAD specific GPU vs a gaming GPU i would be very appreciative.

My home computer which i built last year has Radeon 6950's (crossfire is not enabled in Cad or Revit or Photoshop, so lets consider my two cards as simply one) and it performs several orders of mangantude better than my office workstation (Dell) which cost $3,200 and has a quadro GPU (which cost $1500). My home build was sub $2000...

My 2 Cent's... buy a gaming GPU which will cost you significantly less money and perform better in CAD & Revit. This Geforce 570 fits in your budget and i believe will provide excellent performance/value