Question on Workstation Graphics cards

[maleko]

Hi, i work for a semi-small engineering firm as both it's IT staff and one of it's lead designers. Several months back i built a couple new workstations, that were supposed to be powerhouses, but at the same time not break the bank. both systems are identical and use the following parts:

AMD Phenom 8450
Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe
ATI FireGL V3600 256mb
2gb Corsair Dominator XMS2 PC6400 DDR2
Seagate 7200.10 160gb sata3
LG dvd burner
Antec Neopower 550 watt
Antec 900 case
Win XP Pro sp3

Anyways, these stations work great for pretty much everything that we normally do, but lately we haven't been doing normal stuff. We use AutoCAD 2008 for all our drafting, which as of late includes a lot more 3d. We've noticed some significant lagging when we're doing the 3d modeling as of late, and now i've been tasked with building another station, this one built pretty much solely for 3d work.

Can anyone give me some suggestions on what parts might work better than what we're currently useing? Or if anyone knows any tricks to getting autocad to perform better that would help too.

 

[itakey]

Ram is cheap compared to what it used too, definitely get at least 4GB to 8GB.

 

[Denithor]

Well, you're definitely short on RAM, as mentioned already.

Read over this thread.

Since you're on 32-bit XP you cannot use more than 3.5GB on the system. Go ahead and boost it to 8GB, buy RamDisk Plus from superspeed.com (XP 32-bit) and make yourself a 4.5GB ramdisk on each system. Set your windows pagefile and tmp/temp files to this drive and also your autocad scratch file.

You could also try the old softmod trick. Get a 640MB 8800GTS (cheap these days, even find one on eBay or the FS/FT forum here) and follow the instructions here. One of those cards, even without the softmod, might be an improvement over what you've got in there now.

EDIT: Just noticed, you're building a new system from scratch. I suggest trying the above first to see if you can simply improve performance by increasing memory and/or a different video card.

If you do build from scratch, go with Vista Business x64 so you have support for more memory.

Low budget:
Q9400 (2.66GHz, 6MB cache) + ASUS P5Q Pro + G.Skill 8GB DDR2

Higher budget:
Q9550 (2.83GHz, 12MB cache) + ASUS P5Q Deluxe + G.Skill 16GB DDR2

Finish things off with a WD6400AAKS and pick out a video card (don't scrimp too much here) and you're gtg.

 

[wwswimming]

i suggest you buy one of these & install it in one of the CAD systems to
compare performance to the FireGL & Quadro video cards.

SAPPHIRE 100225L Radeon HD 3870 512MB 256-bit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814102719

i would suggest the 4850, or a 4870 with 1 GB of memory ($299), because
they're fast, but it takes time for graphics drivers to be debugged. that's
why i'm suggesting the 3870 - it's been out for a year+.

 

[faxon]

if you are doing a ton of 3D rendering make sure to get a card with at least 1GB of video memory per chip, preferably more. the main reason the workstation cards cost so much more is because it is hard to get good yields on the super high density ram they use to boost them up to 2GB+. personally i would get a 48701GB or a GTX280 but if i had the cash i would get one of the nvidia workstation cards based on the same GPU as the 280. you can pick it out by its 933 GFlop single floating point precision. also, do what some of the other posteres above mentioned and set up a ram disk + get like 16gb of ram. also, make sure you get a 45nm quad for your rig, the latest versions of all the design software use the SSE4.1 instruction sets which only the 45nm quads currently support, and it speeds things up as much as 40% at the same MHz in some applications.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Whats the budget?

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Whats the budget?

My thought exactly, the OP indicates these were built with price definitely in mind ("not break the bank"). I doubt that a $2k GPU is going to fly.