GTX 970 v K2200 for Inventor 2015

[Anonymous]

I'm really hoping someone can help me. I'm just about down building a computer for my brother who is going to be doing design and 3D modeling in inventor. It's strictly mechanical parts. I'm torn between the GTX 970 and Quadro K2200. They are about $75-100 price difference which isn't a huge deal, but if money can be saved, it's preferred. Now, I'm honestly trying to get through the marketing hype of Quadro and it's "officially supported" status with Inventor. I do understand there is some value in that with drives and autodesk support.

Does anyone have any experience with either of these or GTX vs Quadro in general? Is the only upside to Quadro having a smoothing real time view? I'm just curious and feel free to school me in anything mentioned. I'm a sponge right now trying to simply understand. I've looked at the actual specs and it just seems the GTX 970 runs circles around the K2200. But as with many things in tech, specs do not equal performance. But since I have no experience, I don't know if that holds true in this case.

[Mark.Lancaster]

jens0771

Welcome to the forum...

The GTX 970 is not listed under the Autodesk recommended/certified hardware list [http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?siteID=123112&id=18844534&results=1&stype=graphic&produ... for Inventor 2015 (Win 7 or 8).  I was thinking that card was for gaming and should be avoided for CAD.   In my opinion I would go with the K2200 which is certified and recommended by Autodesk. 

[pball]

If you search the forum, you'll see more users suggest good gaming cards over work station cards. I'll let you search if you want to hear the arguments.

[Anonymous]

Hi Mark,

I understand that it's not "recommended/certified", but I've read there are
plenty of people running "gaming" cards for autodesk application such as
AutoCad, Maya, Inventor, etc. From what I'm able to piece together is the
difference is down to driver and customer support which is the extra cost.
I'd rather not be hoodwinked with corporate "speak" if you will going with
the "workstation" card just because they call it a "workstation" card.

With Inventor being DX since 2013, I'm just hard pressed to find the actual
reason the quadro's are sanctioned other than they only come in one
"flavor" if you will compared to GTX 970's.

[Anonymous]

Thanks pball,

I'd like to hear your personal opinion on the subject matter if you don't
mind. I'll also be looking through forums a little more thorough.

[blair · Accepted solution]

Prior to Inventor 11 (not 2011), Inventor used OpenGL and required a "Work-Station" card for OpenGL. With the release of IV11 ADSK added Direct3D which no longer requires a OpenGL graphics card. A good "gamming" card will work at considerably less money.

There are a number of people still using "Quadro" work-station card, they seem to have more graphics issues than those with the cheaper cards. We quit using "Quadro" cards at release IV12. That puts us to 8 years on "gamming" cards without any issues and considerably cheaper cards.

The only real requirement is Microsoft certified drivers.

[pball]

Well my personal experience is with Quadro cards at work and they work. I have run Inventor on my radeon 6800 at home, but I haven't done more than a few hours and basic modeling at home.

That said if I was building a cad workstation I would get a good gaming card. Another thing I've noticed is I see Inventor maxing the cpu much more than the gpu.

[Anonymous]

I realize this discussion is almost a year old now, but I saw no other replies and I wanted to see what you went with. I do hope you went with the GTX 970 as it has almost triple the cores of the Quadro K2200 you were looking at and in realtime usage of AutoCAD producing highly detailed product design solid models, and large ones at that, it DOES run circles around the Quadro, and even the K4200 has less cores with the 970 selling for half the price. Matter of fact, the ONLY thing I saw that the Quadro did significantly better was the power consumption at 65W versus the 145W for the 970. The MSI GTX 970 ME or 4G gaming, both support OpenGL 4.4/4.5.

K2200    = $419

K4200    = $784

GTX970  = $359

And these are Newegg prices. I purchased my MSI GTX 970 ME for $329. The 970 is just a monster for the price. And I use the same card to run Siemens NX 9.0 flawlessly for both FEA and Moldflow.

[blair]

This post started today, it uses a common software to bench test different systems:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-general-discussion/how-fast-is-your-inventor-pc-really/td-p/5...

[Anonymous]

As a quick note, my system at home is an i5 2500K, MSI GTX 970 ME, 16Gb Vengeance DDR3 Ram, EVGA Z68 SLI, (1) 300Gb Velociraptor, (1) 1Tb WD Blue, Win 7 Pro X64. I am upgrading the CPU to an i7 3770K shortly.