Forget Quadro: won't get support from MS any more and technical
advantages are gone without the MS support, so you are paying a high
premium price for the same performance as a much lower priced gamer's
chip. The "surplus stock" on the Quadro is due to the fact that nobody
with knowledge of the whole story is buying them. There are some super
expensive Quadro's but I don't know if they are any faster than the
highest end gamer's card.
Forget SLI and XFire: not supported by Autodesk at this time. (Some of
the GPU as processor functions may be useful later, but by then you may
have replaced your computer, so why pay now?)
As the current speed champ in GPU's is Nvidia, I would get an sli
capable motherboard, but only get the best GPU from Nvidia that I could
afford.
ThreeDeeUser wrote:
> Hi all, this is exactly what I too need to find out as currently speccing 2 new pc's for AutoCad 2010 and would appreciate your input / experience on this.
>
> Sorry in advance for all the questions but I prefer to look dumb but get the right stuff than wasting money on a lower performing system when used for what I want.
>
> I understand rendering performance isn't reliant upon the gpu so what can a better gpu give you?
> Would 2 gaming cards in sli / xfire offer any performance in displaying a 3d model?
> Is a "better" gpu just classed as bigger memory at higher speed?
> For large 3d files is there any real benefit or need for using say 2x FX3700's or 2x HD4870's?
>
> Currently looking at these to use in single or SLI / Xfire, what would you buy?:
> Quadro FX3700 (512Mb DDR3), new £220 each (price is correct - surplus stock).
> GTX285 (1024Mb DDR3), Cuda/PhysX new £240 each
> GTX275 (896Mb DDR3), Cuda/PhysX new £170 each
> ATI HD4890 (1Gb DDR5), new £140 each
> ATI HD4870 (1Gb DDR5), new £110 each
> not looked at any 4850X2, etc gpu's as meant to be very noisy.
>
> I want to do some CFD aswell so not sure if the NV gpu's would offer better performance for that application over non Cuda/PhysX ATI?
>
> I've looked at 3 gpu's in sli but not sure if I could benefit plus the extra noise, heat and huge power consumption is exactly what I don't want so if I can get away with just one GPU then I will.