Reccomended hardware.

[Nitro420]

My workplace is doing a computer upgrade very soon. I was wondering what the importance of those professional video cards such as the quadro are. For the price of the lowest end quadro you can pretty much get a top of the line gaming card. We don't want to spend a lot of money on the card if at all possible.

We are thinking of getting either a pentium 840 or athlon x2 4800+ machine and was wondering what kind of card to get. Price is a concern. We are running NX2 and NX3. These are not UG only machines as only about 50% of our workload is actually graphics based.

In short.. what is the cheapest hardware that will run somewhat complicated NX3 assemblies and run custom QT based software quickly?

 

[looslib]

The difference between the botton end and the top end of the Quadro FX line can be quantified, but it takes special programs. here is a link to the Nvidia web site page that compares the performance:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html

The higher the SPEC test number the faster the card will be able to manipulate and shade your model.

When running 3D solid modelling software, CPU, RAM and graphics card are not areas to skimp on.



"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
"Fixed in the next release" should replace "Product First" as the PTC slogan.

Ben Loosli
Sr IS Technologist
L-3 Communications

 

[larrycoyle]

From personal experience over the past few years of first selling hardware and then becoming an end user of UG. You can never have enough memory or a good enough video card. They can make up for processor speed but do not scrimp on the video card. If I remember correctly, UG recommends NVidia cards. You might want to look on their web site as they have monthly hardware specials for their customers.

Larry Coyle
Cylinder Head Engineering, LLC
True Simultaneous 5-axis CNC Porting

Larry Coyle
Cylinder Head Engineering, LLC

http://www.cylinderheadengineering.com

 

[jackley]

Oh would be nice to have something other than a Ultra 60 with not even 2 gigs of memory using NX3.0

It's a tough sell trying to get my company to upgrade. They'll just end up buying refurbish Blade 2000s probably.

I would love for them to get some PC based machines in here. Isn't it true that NX is now better on PC based machines rather than the Unix based machines?

 

[looslib]

Depends on your definition of "better". Yes, UG is developed on Windows and then ported to Unix OS's. There have been some enhancements that have only been in the Windows code because it would have been very hard to create the code in Unix.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli
Sr IS Technologist
L-3 Communications

 

[Dave K]

I've run a nVidia FX500 card, and it works fine for basic modeling. I also have a nVidia FX1400 and it runs alot better, but costs alot more too. I wouldn't run anything less than the FX500 (or equiv), for basic modeling/drafting/cnc.

-Dave
Everything should be designed as simple as possible, but not simpler.