Undecided between three different CAD-oriented cards

I'm considering the following cards:
AMD FirePro V4900
AMD FirePro V3900
Nvidia Quadro 600

I'm currently leaning strongly towards the V4900, although I'm unsure if it will be appropriate. Heck, maybe there's a consumer card out there that would be better for what I need somehow?

I spend a fair amount of time in 3Ds Max and ZBrush; about 3-9 hours a week. I also find myself loading up AutoCAD about once or twice a month. The complexity of the models I work on is enough to make my GTX 285's fan go full throttle. The frame rate stays decent, usually around 17 or above. However, in AutoCAD, while the card's fan doesn't take off, the frame rate will drop dramatically on models with either little more than a few instances of non-planar geometry (e.g. spheres and extruded splines), a large amount of geometry overall (e.g. a house), or a combination of the two. The switch from a Core 2 Duo E6600 to an i5 3570 hardly changed the situation with AutoCAD, so I'm left to believe that it's the graphics card acting as a hurdle (and yes, I've tried different drivers, settings within AutoCAD, etc.).

As an added note, even though I have only one display right now (1920x1200), I would like the ability to feed two (3840x1200) in the future.

Actually, all of those cards are quite a bit slower than your GTX 285. I would suggest looking at one of the GCN based AMD Firepro cards. These are the Firepro W series. However, they are all very expensive, with the cheapest one being over $500.

Honestly, you would probably be just fine with a consumer card. The FirePro W600 uses the same GPU as the $100 Radeon 7750. The latest gen Radeons are a bit better at compute than the nVidia cards, as long as your apps use OpenCL and not CUDA. Honestly my reccomendation you be to buy the best Radeon 7000 series card (7750 or higher) that you can afford. The 7770 is about $150 and gets you 640 (up from 512) shader cores, and if you want to mode to the 7800 series you get 2GB of ram on a faster bus and 1024 shaders on the 7850 or 1280 shaders on the 7870.

Card Shaders Ram Cost
7750 512 1GB $89
7770 640 1GB $129
7850 1024 2GB $179
7870 1280 2GB $239

extide said:

Actually, all of those cards are quite a bit slower than your GTX 285. I would suggest looking at one of the GCN based AMD Firepro cards. These are the Firepro W series. However, they are all very expensive, with the cheapest one being over $500.

Honestly, you would probably be just fine with a consumer card. The FirePro W600 uses the same GPU as the $100 Radeon 7750. The latest gen Radeons are a bit better at compute than the nVidia cards, as long as your apps use OpenCL and not CUDA. Honestly my reccomendation you be to buy the best Radeon 7000 series card (7750 or higher) that you can afford. The 7770 is about $150 and gets you 640 (up from 512) shader cores, and if you want to mode to the 7800 series you get 2GB of ram on a faster bus and 1024 shaders on the 7850 or 1280 shaders on the 7870.

Card Shaders Ram Cost
7750 512 1GB $89
7770 640 1GB $129
7850 1024 2GB $179
7870 1280 2GB $239

Click to expand...

Good thinking! I wish there were more single slot options for the 7770 and 7850 though. All I've been able to find is the Afox HD 7850, and that goes for over $300!

Thanks for your input.

Why do you want a single slot one?

extide said:

Why do you want a single slot one?

Click to expand...

I'm a pedant. I don't like having my PCIe x1 slot covered / the graphics card sitting directly next to my unshielded audio card. I'm completely fine with a double-slot card though.