Graphics card for 2d cad.

Can anyone recommend a graphics card for 2d cad? I have Autocad LT 2010 of which I only use for 2d cad. I have seen the PNY Quadro FX580 512MB 128bit GDDR3 DSVI Display Port Out PCI-E Graphics Card of which seems to be a reasonable card for cad use. Any advice on this or any other cards would be much appreciated.

Thank you,

Daryl

darylt I've used the same graphics card, 2D CAD work.

Never had any problem.

One of the GeForce FX cards would probably do just as well at a bit of a cost savings.

Concur, Quadro will be way overkill for 2D work.

Ok - if quadro is overkill, can you please suggest others that will be suitable?

Thank you,

Daryl

Sure, what's your budget? I do prefer nVidia cards so as Remark said a good GF card would be OK. Here is the nVidia GF9600 GSO 1.5 GB ram...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130543

It is $84.99 and has better performance than the Quadro FX560 (close to the 580)...

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=563&card2=483

With 2D work integrated graphics will do the job just fine. No need to spend extra money if it's not necessary.

Of course, if you don't have integrated graphics I'd recommend something along the lines of a 9400GT or an HD4350.

Of course in the long run it all depends on the rest of your PC's specs. Could we have those please?

CAD users and gamers should stay away from integrated graphic chips and go with a dedicated graphics card in my opinion.

I may be young but from personal experience I have found no difference in performance when I had my GPU in my PC and when I was using onboard while my GPU was in RMA. Then again, this may be because I don't use a workstation card.

I still will say in the long run 4GB of RAM and a quad core will do you nicely, and be much more helpful than a GPU.

Alex:

When you do 3D and get into more complex drawings an onboard graphics chip will choke and then start to steal resources wherever it can which then leads to a system slow down.

I may be young but from personal experience I have found no difference in performance when I had my GPU in my PC and when I was using onboard while my GPU was in RMA. Then again, this may be because I don't use a workstation card.

 

I still will say in the long run 4GB of RAM and a quad core will do you nicely, and be much more helpful than a GPU.

Well it does make a difference. Also most on board cards do not match requirements for high end applications (CAD and such). Ram is cheap these days and so are video cards. I paid $100 for my AGP GF6600 card 3 years ago and a $50 PCIe card will blow it away in performance today. All the pieces have to work together. If you need OpenGL 2.0 to run a particular app, all the ram in the world with a 6 core CPU still won't run it

This came with my 3 year old Dell, and I am happy with it. I do get a bit of reluctance to zoom back out from small details without a regen now and again. Not sure if that's my card or LT.

NVIDIA System Information report created on: 04/30/2010 13:10:52

System name: nunyabizwax

[Display]

Processor: Intel® Core™2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz (2394 MHz)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)

DirectX version: 10.0

GPU processor: GeForce 8600 GTS

ForceWare version: 163.71

Total available graphics memory: 1534 MB

Dedicated video memory: 256 MB

System video memory: 0 MB

Shared system memory: 1278 MB

Video BIOS version: 60.84.50.00.08

Guess where the shared memory comes from.

Guess where the shared memory comes from.

Since I am only running a 1 gig brain, I bet most of it comes from the hard drive, or 'virtual' as they call it. Then it gets paged in and out of the processor when it fits.

Zattit? I spent many years as a programmer but never been very into the hardware. Now if you ask me whether long or short intake runners produce more torque in a V8, then I can answer.:wink: