Replacing a blown Quadro 4000 - suggestions?

[LB-ID]

I have a three-year-old graphics workstation that I'm using primarily for Illustrator and Photoshop work. I had an Nvidia Quadro 4000 in it that recently threw craps, and I'm not terribly up to speed on professional cards these days.

I can certainly just go out and get a mainstream card relatively inexpensively, but don't know how well that will hold up under design duties. I had to stick in an older spare Radeon 5770 I had lying around to get me to minimal running...other than having trouble with a decent refresh, it's not terrible, so I figure a mainstream card wouldn't hurt. However, if there are decent graphic design cards out there that won't break the bank, that would be helpful too (not going to blow thousands of dollars for a replacement card for a 3-year-old system).

Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

 

[moonbogg]

The Quadro K4000 is the replacement and is about $760 on Newegg. Its what I use and it works well. You can probably find one on ebay or just get a new cheaper model that I'm sure would do fine. It depends on what kind of driver support you need for those programs which will tell you if a gaming card will work or if you need a Quadro.

 

[LB-ID]

The Abobe Creative Suite 6 that I use is supposedly "optimized" for the graphics-specific cards, but I haven't seen much evidence of it. I'm surprised honestly at how well the old 5770 is doing this morning. Other than the resolution, it's having no problems at all handling design duties.

Thanks for the info on the K4000, Moonbogg. I'll look into that one.

 

[zir_blazer]

You can try modding a consumer GeForce into a Quadro, but you need soldering skills. Also, I don't know if they end up being 1:1 in features and performance than their Quadro equivalents. As far that I recall, softmodding unlocked some extra features and performance, but it was below the real thing. Not sure on that hardmod.

There is few hard evidence on what does professional cards specifically do on many applications. On some they seem to do the same but faster due having custom Drivers, on others is a feature that you can't use with GPU acceleration. As an example, AutoCAD is supposed to be used with professional cards yet during the last decade, I saw it running perfectly even on low end machines with crappy integrated graphics. I think the professional cards were just used for real time views, because even for rendering the CPU was usually preferred.

 

[LB-ID]

That's always kind of been my suspicion zir_blazer, but until now I'd never had any evidence at all. Seeing how well this $100 card is performing compared to what was at the time of purchase a $2000 card, it's really giving me some pause.

I think I'll start out by purchasing a $3-400 consumer card and see how that performs. If there's a problem I can always use it in a gaming rig sometime, but if it works I've saved myself quite a bit of money.

 

[ggadrian]

If the software you're using has good support for FirePro, then I'd go for a W5000, it's more or less (in many cases more) like a Quadro K4000 and it costs much less.

 

[LB-ID]

If the software you're using has good support for FirePro, then I'd go for a W5000, it's more or less (in many cases more) like a Quadro K4000 and it costs much less.

Thanks, I'll look into that. I'm finding that since the Quadro only needed one six-pin power rail, that's all this workstation was set up to provide. Many modern cards need a six- and an eight-pin rail, so that limits my selections quite a bit. I could try replacing the power supply, but in these Dell units the cases are usually built so that they'll only support proprietary designs, not sure I want to mess with that.

 

[LB-ID]

Just a follow-up for those who are curious, I ended up finding a nice deal on a Radeon 7870 and put that in instead. I'm frankly blown away, performance is head and shoulders above a Quadro that costs 3x as much. Just barely had the power for it, and had to get some right-angle PCIE connectors to make everything fit, but it's humming right along now.

Thanks again for the info and advice, folks!