idiosynchronic
Junior Member
I'm in the process of selecting videocards for a mixed group of users. Of 30 machines, 26 are going to office staff, 2 are going to the network admin and I (the desktop admin), and 2 are going to our graphics artists. Everyone will have the same boxen (hopefully a Shuttle 50 kit), but depending on job task, the contents of the boxes will vary for memory, videocard, & processor.
So what do you buy 2 graphics artists that will make for the least managability issues when lumped with 28 other plain vanilla cards?
I'm leaning towards Nvidia cards for everyone, because of the unifed driver technology. The 28 vanilla cards will likely be GeForce2 MX's as they are, 1) cheap, 2) plentiful, 3) long-product life and stability, & 4) Cheap. (Did I say cheap is good?) The artist cards must be able to do the following: integrate with the Shuttle small-factor box and board without conflicts, offer substantial improvement in graphics editing vs. the vanillas, support AutoCAD 2000/2002, Autodesk Inventor, CorelDraw, & Windows XP Pro, and lastly offer dual monitor support in one card.
Canidates for the artist cards:
Thanks.
So what do you buy 2 graphics artists that will make for the least managability issues when lumped with 28 other plain vanilla cards?
I'm leaning towards Nvidia cards for everyone, because of the unifed driver technology. The 28 vanilla cards will likely be GeForce2 MX's as they are, 1) cheap, 2) plentiful, 3) long-product life and stability, & 4) Cheap. (Did I say cheap is good?) The artist cards must be able to do the following: integrate with the Shuttle small-factor box and board without conflicts, offer substantial improvement in graphics editing vs. the vanillas, support AutoCAD 2000/2002, Autodesk Inventor, CorelDraw, & Windows XP Pro, and lastly offer dual monitor support in one card.
Canidates for the artist cards:
* ELSA Nvidia Quadro Pro, a workstation-specific graphics card with 64 MB DDR and is AGP pro only. Cheapest I've found it is $200 online. All other workstation cards are outside of my price limit.
* Any consumer Nvidia GeForce card with higher specs than the GeForce2 MX, up to a price of about $200.
* Matrox Millenium G550, because of its dual-head integration and its very strong 2-d rendering scores. Both artists are still working with 2-D software, but one is trying to work toward integrating Inventor because of particular illustration chores. (I did consider the new Parhelia, until I saw the price!)
Thanks.
