good video card for pro engineering 3

[kasemodz]

hi, I'm a teacher and I'm starting a class for engineering. I'm going to install pro engineering software on 30 of my computers. They have a pentium 4 2.8ghz with 768mb of ram. Right now I have been using integrated video card for doing auto cad and stuff. What video cards should I buy for engineering program? I don't want to spend a lot on it. I want to spend about $3000 for all 30 computers, coming out to be around 100 dollars per computer.

If I get an ati radeon 9600xt with 256mb of ram, will that be sufficent to run the program? Do I need to get a video card from the pro engineering website?

http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/30892en_file1.pdf

 

[Hora]

In my opinion, the reviews written by the people who run ProE on different video cards is more valuable than the scores of benchmark tests.

-Hora

 

[alphaguru]

For school usages the PCI card should be fine. I have a student edition that I run at home with a PCI card and I have no problems. I'd suggest setting a few stations up with a better card and reserving them for students working with large assemblies. Also if memory and performance is getting to be a problem, you can use that as an chance to teach them how to make shrinkwraps and simplified reps of parts to cut down on memory usage. At work I sometimes work with assemblies with over 1,000 parts. Even with 1 GB of ram, 3.0 processor, and a decent card some assemblies can take an hour or longer to load.