Quadro 600 or FirePro V4800? Some experience?

Hi,

i'm planing my new pc. And i want to now if there is some Nvidia vs AMD experience here.

There was a test in a german magazine and the FirePro V4800 is cheaper then the Q600 and really kills them. The thing is that i'm normally not an Radeon fan.

The whole config looks like that:

CPU: Core i7-950 LGA 1366

RAM: 12 GB

HDDs: 4x 300 GB VelociRaptor (2x RAID0)

VGA 1: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 570 AMP!

VGA 2: Quadro 600 or FirePro V4800

Don't know the board yet cause i need to check what LucidLogix Hydra boards are

out there.

So is there something that speaks more for Nvidia and tells me not to by a FirePro?

I have been happy with several Nvidia products when using Solidworks. I think the Quadro4000 is a great choice for the money(about $700usd most places). The next jump up from there is a better card but not proportional to the amount of money for most people. I dont have any experience with the quadro 600 but i dont typically like firepro cards at all so i might be bias:)

I'm a hardcore computer user but not (until now) a hardcore 3D/CAD guy.

So the only two cards of choice because of money are the Quadro 600 and FirePro V4800.

But i just found out there is no LGA 1366 board with LucidLogix Hydra chip.

But anyways i to multiboot. So i separate my working OS from my gaming OS.

So i think it would not be a problem if i deactivate the Quadro/FirePro in the gaming OS and the GeForce in the working OS in the device manager.

How is the normal stuff working with the pro graphic cards? I guess stuff like h.264 decoding must be also better (watching movies/flash in the browser...).

Well there is a definite line in the sand between gaming cards and cad cards. If you are going to crunch a bunch of math, simulations, rendering and so on these new nvidia cards with their Cuda cores and onboard memory do a great job. If you dont do any rendering(or need quick render times), dont do any simulation or visualization type stuff or work with really large assemblies then you probably dont need to spend more than $200-$300 on a card. You may also be able to find some older FX cards for sale cheap second hand.

With the cad stuff you can make do with lesser cards by reducing your visualization stuff on the screen. Things like shadows/reflections eat up that graphic memory. How arcs are displayed and so on. Ive used Nvidia GeForce 7100 and 8600 with good results. now something like a Quadro 600 is a good entry card. When you look at the entry card and a middle of the road card the jump isnt that much(but neither is the price). The biggest jump is when you get into something like the 4000. You almost quadruple the bandwith, double the memory interface and size, and the cuda cores go way up.

I think the quadro600 would do alright with solidworks but you would probably be disappointed with gaming. Just my initial take on it.

For my home system i run a core i-7 x980 overclocked to 4.15ghz and 12gb ram. i am very happy with the system and its a good choice for the base of your new computer

I know that a Quadro is not for gaming, thats the reason for the GTX570 :-)

I saw that you can get older FX cards cheap at ebay but don't know how they perform - i mean how big the difference is between an ol FX and a new Quadro/FirePro.

What i do is small stuff with maybe not more than 100-200 parts so i think i don't need a monster pro card. In the moment Solidworks is running here an my 20" laptop with a 512MB Geforce 8800GTS and it's running ok.

But what i don't like is that there is no realview and thats the reason i want a pro card.

If you go to the solidworks site there is a list of approved video cards with drivers so you can see what they think works. I run a quadro 5000 and have had a few problems because it hasnt been tested/supported yet(at the time i started running it).

RealView is nice some times but i almost never use it. You can turn on the Render Preview window and not worry about updating/refreshing the entire model.

Ah ok, learned again something new - there is a preview window.

I did not render anything until before 10 minutes

So here it is - my new desk in the new room

It's so cool to see it before you build it.

So with this preview there is really no need for real view.

But preview and end rendering is still faster with a Quadro - or?

Nice work.

Yes i use the preview window when i need to visualize. The only time I turn Real View on is if i am dealing with some complex shapes and i want to see how the light/reflections transitions across them. I never leave it on. Some people do though.

The new quadro cards with how their fermi architecture is setup does speed up render times. Renders that took me hours on my old GeForce card on my desktop take a few minutes with my new system/quadro 5000. If you dont need to do quick renders you can get by with lower cards. You can also use Solidworks scheduler and render scenes overnight. Also once you start a render in PV360 you can go back and model/setup a new view and so on.

It's really not easy to put a workstation/gaming mix together.

I changed the CPU now to a Xeon E3-1230 (faster/cheaper than the i7-950).

So it's now a socket 1155. And there are some 1155 boards out there with

Lucid Hydra chip (MSI Big Bang-Marshal/MSI Big Bang-Fuzion/Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z).

I don't know if the problems with the mixing of pro and consumer graphics cards start at the OS or the motherboard. If it starts at OS level it would not be a problem with dualboot if you disable one card in the device manager. If its a motherboard thing than you need a Lucid chip.

Also i don't know if a Quadro or FirePro runs in PCIe x8 mode. Most boards switch to

x8 if you but another card into the second x16 slot.

I prefer a workstation board but there is only the Asus P8B WS out there with

a C206 chip. Boards with C202 and C204 have not enough slots.

Also there are only two x16 slots and that eliminates the possibility to make a GeForce SLI at some time.

I ask myself if that would work:

Big Bang-Fuzion

PCI_E1 x1

PCI_E2 x16 FirePro V4800

PCI_E3 x1

PCI

PCI_E4 x8 GTX 570

PCI-

PCI_E5 x8 GTX 570

I wish I could help you with some of those questions but i just dont have the answers for you unfortunately. I do know Win7 does exert some control over your graphics if you arent careful. I dont know if there are any motherboard problems though.

My work machine uses a Xeon W3565 @3.2GHz and my home Core i7 is a million times better. There are several other system differences but I havent been overly impressed with the Xeon. the E3-1230 is better than what i have in a few ways so maybe you will have better lucky with it.