Upgrade ATI video cards need suggestions

[Anonymous]

Hi,

This is a college lab setting.  We teach Autodesk, and Revit Mechanical.  I have 25 Dell Optiplex 760 PCs.  Memory 2 GB, Windows XP.

Any suggestions on what ATI cards would be good?  Price is an issue.

Joe

[Anonymous]

You'd be MUCH better off using any money to upgrade OS to Win 7 64 and add ram to 8 gig.  No video card is going to help.

Reid

[Anonymous]

The question is how much do they have to pay for the OS upgradeand would they have driver issues for their plotters etc.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, I know.

That's a really hard thing about education budgets.  But if they DON'T, they risk not being able to teach the latest software and graduate unemployable students.

At this point, plain acad is 2 releases into a 64 bit OS and XP is dying quickly.

Reid

[Anonymous]

Current versions of autocad are still being released 32 bit as well as 64 bit. But you are right that they are running up against a wall. Their best bet is as you said, but to keep an xp machine or two around for plotting.

Another issue is how old are the cpu's on their current machines and do they support 64 bit. Intel was late to the game with 64 bit machines. Also will their current motherboards support extra memory. Some lower end machines only handled two sticks of ram, and couldn't handle the ram density, perhaps 1gig sticks max.

In today's economy with the attacks on education budgets, it seems unlikely that they could get the money to replace whole machines. They'll probably be told that it worked up till now, so it should still work.

They'd probably be better off replacing the whole machine with Intel graphics (shudder at the thought) than replacing videocards.