X600 question concerning CAD

[drum]

How would an ati 256mb X600 handle autocad 2007 on a pentium D830 with 2GB ram?
I'm not familiar with cards geared toward CAD

 

[drum]

any ideas?

 

[LW07]

I think you'd need a professional card like this one to have a good CAD card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102469
If you have PCI-Express. ATI FireGL V5100

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102470
If you have AGP.

I don't know much about CAD and other professional cards, but I think these would do better than an X600, because the X600 is geared more towards more casual use, such as games or other non-professional stuff.

 

[wwswimming]

after spending 10 years doing & supervising engineering & related drafting, i finally
got into the computer age in 1988 using a 286.

since then, i've used a lot of different CAD machines, both the expensive dual
Xeon workstations with the ATI FireGL, and the nVidia 6600 and ATI X850XT
video cards that gamers use.

the latter work just as well.

i'm speaking of programs like Solidworks and 3D Studio Max.

conceivably, Autocad could be bloated & might benefit from extra graphics
card firepower.

i suggest a mid-range solution, such as the eVGA 7600 GT, which is a
PCI-E card.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130283

$170, or $140 if you have time to fill out the rebate.

i think a lot of IT people buy those high-end CAD cards because they're
spending someone else's money and because they're afraid to make a
mistake and they know if they buy the expensive card that it will be
"mission accomplished".

what they don't know is, they could buy the $150 card and also have
"mission accomplished."

if you're doing pre-vis work that involves working directly with
film directors and manipulating thousands of objects on screen,
yeah, then you need major firepower.

one other note - my ATI X850XT works great with 3D Studio Max.

i tried an X800XT and it was SLOOOOOOOOOOW - a driver problem.
i spent a half hour on it and returned it and got the MSI 6600 with
256 MB - which is perfectly adequate. in other words, some of the
cards do have driver problems.

i haven't had driver problems with nVidia so if i was doing the
task you describe, i'd use the nVidia card.

my experience with A'Cad is with versions 10 through 14,
then 2000 & 200X, i forget the last version. i have the full-
function demo of 2006 but don't use it. personally i think
the best version of A'Cad was 12 for Windows.

 

[Lord Banshee]

I have used both pro card and gamer cards with CAD Apps.

Gamer cards do the job, but some apps have problems like visual artifacts and slow downs in certain things.

I can say i notice a difference with equ gamer GPU and Pro GPU all due to the drivers and nothing with the hardware .

But i like FireGL cards as they are cheaper than quadros equ. But i the apps i use quadros usally do better (Rhino3D, Unigraphics, Autocad)

 

[drum]

Thanks for the insight guys

 

[BassBomb]

i concur, i have also used 3dsmax and autocad with my 6600GT and FX5200 and originalyl GF2

autocad relies on higher 2D performance when not using autocad 3D