Choosing a video card

[AJLynn]

I'm going through a round of upgrades / part replacements due to power-spike-induced failure, and it seems I'm going to need a new graphics card to go along with everything else. I've been using an ATI All-In-Wonder 7500 which I bought a while back because of price, game performance and the TV feature, but my computer usage patterns have changed considerably since then and what I do now is much more about 3DS Max, Sketchup, AutoCAD and Illustrator/Indesign/Photoshop. I'm looking at a few options in approximately the same price range, and would appreciate any advice - it's easy to find explanations of how many frames per second I'll get when playing Super Carnage 3, harder to find people talking about performance when editing a complex 3D model

 

The system, by the way, is now an Athlon64 3000+ on an MSI K8N Neo Platinum motherboard (using nForce3 250) with 1GB Corsair XMS PC3200 at 2.5-3-3-6

 

Some cards that are in my price range (all prices from Newegg.com):

 

ATI FGL 9600 128MB (AKA FireGL-T2-128) - $215.50 OEM / $244.50 retail

ATI AIW Radeon 9600XT 128MB - $187

 

(Is there much difference between the FGL and Radeon products of the same generation?)

 

MSI GeForce 6600GT 128MB - $222

PNY nVIDIA Quadro FX 500 128MB - $214

[3dp]

i'll second that

do your home work and choose nvida

some of the game cards can be "patched" to quadro specs

i's also check ebay

case in point i got a dell precision 650 back end of last year 1 month old fitted with a quadro 3000 for less than the cost of card retail

quadros here in the uk come up pretty regular in fact for any high end but not bleeding edge hardware it's my first port of call

[AJLynn]

Is there a big performance difference between Quadro 4 XGL series and Quadro FX? The nVidia site has benchmarks for both, but they're different versions of the tests

[AJLynn]

I'm still on AGP - tried a K8T800 board and had some issues so I switched to a nForce3, which doesn't have PCIE. I see both Quadro4 and FX in AGP versions, the 4s look like the older line but/so more likely to find them cheap but I have no idea what the performance difference between the lines is.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

nvidia is trying to do away with its agp line, and i expect ati will follow. nvidia 6 series was introduced only as pci express, and it is only now that they are retro fitting agp adapters onto the cards. after this series, i don't expect them to support agp at all. pcie is faster than agp, but the cards aren't taking full advantage of it yet, so i don't think you will notice that much of a speed increase, but you will be set for the future if you alread have pcie.

[AJLynn]

Thanks. Besides the AGP/PCIE issue do you know if there's a large difference between the Quadro 4 and FX? (Like, am I better off with an FX 500 or a Quadro 4 750 or even 900? The 750 and 900 being at higher points on an older curve, it's hard to judge if you don't know what the curves are...)

 

The AGP/PCIE issue isn't really an issue for me - my MB doesn't support PCIE, and anyway, the state of it right now is that the PCIE cards aren't significantly faster yet. This is another thing that's much easier to figure out about the gamer cards than the workstation ones - they're in a transition now where cards like nVidia 6800GT PCIE versions are using an internal bridge chip that limits their ability to utilize the advantages of PCIE (this is an area where ATI has the advantage).