Video Card [single or double]

smurv

Hi guys
I have a problem. I'm going to change my old 3650 graphics card for something new. I'm works mainly on sketchup autocad and Corel. Quadro is too expensive so i need somethink normal ..

Current equipment:
Q9550 + P5Q-E
4gb ram
raid 0
Eizo 1931 [planning to buy an additional monitor 24 "]

My models can be quite large, 2 million and 1 million line of face
The question is. What will be more efficient:
1x GTX 470/GTX 560Ti
or
2x GTX 460/GTX 550Ti

general rule a more expensive graphics card or two at the same price

mitcorb

Hi, smurv:
I have noticed recently that Brodie is very knowledgeable in this area. Do a search on some of his posts. Perhaps there is an answer in there, while you wait for other responses. Best wishes.

solo

I don't believe SU will benefit from a sli configuration.

derei

maybe, it would be useful to have a post with specifications based on users experience, of best PC configurations for SU.

IdahoJ

Solo is correct. Unless an application is compiled and configured for SLI, it's a waste. Dual cards won't benefit you in this case ...

Any of the new cards will work fine. My rule of thumb is to buy as much VRAM on the card as I can afford. No substitute for memory space either in the PC or the video card. As you're going to run a fairly large monitor at higher resolutions I would guess, you're going to need the VRAM ...

That being said, I'd bump up your system RAM to at least 8Gb if your handling large poly sets too. The OS has to handle moving the data to and from the video card and usually copies of the meshes are kept in system RAM, not just video card RAM.

Cheers.

brodie

Thanks for the compliment mitcorb. Sorry I'm so late to this thread. If you've already made a decision it'd be interesting to know which way you went.

I don't have any great insights here. It's an interesting thought but I personally wouldn't want to be the one to test out the theory that it might help. For the most part I feel like specing a computer for SU is like specing a computer to run powerpoint really well. It really doesn't take that much to run it well, and after that it's all overkill. I've got an nVidia 9800GT which was a decent card several years ago but fairly old now. I've already swapped it from an old machine to a replacement once and will continue to do so until the card dies. Viewports (whether it's SU or 3ds max) just don't use video cards to their full potential (see this study done awhile back http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/Reviews/Review076_1.asp ). Now if you're a gamer or you do video production, that's another matter - spec your video card around that rather than SU. In fact that's my general rule. If you do anything besides SU that's computer intensive (video encoding/editing, gaming, whatever), spec your machine primarily around that and SU as an afterthought even if you use it a lot.

I would challenge Idahoj's comment about having at least 8gigs of ram too. I think 4 gigs is fine if SU is your most labor intensive software. 6 wouldn't hurt with a 64-bit OS, but I can't imagine how you'd get to 8. If someone does that, I'm more than open to correction, but I don't see it. SU would run into major issues long before you used that much ram.

-Brodie