Workstation for Civil Designer

[Mal1ce]

Hi all

Anyone here running Civil Designer at all? I've busy specc'ing a machine for a client (Core i7 860, 4GB DDR3, 500GB Western Digital Black Edition, etc), and I'm trying to find out whether a Quadro card would be better than a Geforce?

I've asked on the Civil designer forums, and had recommendations from an Nvidia 9600GT (R700.00 card) all the way to a Quadro FX1800 (R6300.00 card), so any advice here is welcomed.

Thanks

 

[Conradl]

Buy the Quadro whenever possible - although it does depend on what the person is doing. I sold a Quadro to a guy the other day, and it made his old DC PC run faster than his brand new HP QC with a Nvidia 260. I think it is money well spent, and that there is a reason for the higher price tag....

 

[Archer]

When working with programs designed for 3D modelling etc the workstation cards are alot better. The GPU's picked for workstations cards are always in the top percentage of chips made. Only once those chips have been put into workstation cards do the consumer cards get GPU's allocated. A good example - the new nVidia workstation cards (Fermi) will have 512 shaders, while the best consumer card (GTX 480) will only have 480 shaders, and the GTX 470 will have even less.

 

[ponder]

Some nVidia cards can also be flashed with the Quadro bios to enable the extra features.