graphics card. CAD occasionaly dvds

[integerspin]

I am about to upgrade my computer and am wondering about graphics card. I used a matrox G400 for several years and I changed to a MX2 nvidia last year, I seem to recall a problem with pro/e and the matrox. Or maybe the reason to change was 64mb rather than 16..
I don't use it for gaming, just CAD and the odd film..

I am looking at S939 boards. I guess a change to PCI-E isn't going to cost an arm and a leg if I go for the cheapest card, which should be as good as the nvidia[ebay 99p;-)]? I wonder if anyone had any suggestions to what card. I stuck with matrox for years as they seemed very solid. I was told to get a card recomended by PTC for use with pro/e, when I asked for the recomended cards they only recomended expensive ones...........


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ricahrd

[wEvil]

if you are ok with AGP i'd suggest snapping up a 3dlabs wildcat VP on ebay, they're fairly oldly but if you're working on pro/e then you may get a very good deal. IF you're ok with AGP

As for newer cards, I bought a radeon 9800pro towards the end of my degree and it seemed to perform pretty well on the applications I was using at the time (softimage XSI, 3dsmax with no odd graphical glitches) - so i guess that both ATI and Nvidia ironed out all those bugs that made their consumer-level offerings a no-no.

[integerspin]

I should have added.
I am hoping to change to a TFT, my CRT is the size of a small hotel, and would like to go for a large and a, well two large would be nice, 17" tft. I take it a card with DVI will run two monitors OK?
I am happy to stick with AGP, it all depends on what motherboard I end up with, if the agp pci-e cards come in around the same price i would probably go pci-e as there seem to be more motherboards available..

Am I really going to see a great difference with a better card? I can understand with gaming a better card would be good but even with animated models my use is hardly demanding. I do get flickering while using the sketcher in pro/e, someone who is said to know what he's talking about said i need a better graphics card, I am not convinced though...

[scrandman]

Which CAD package are you using - ProEng?

Autocad will run on practically anything (including Intel Extreme "ly poor" integrated graphics). I can't say for sure with other packages though.

[integerspin]

I have been using solidworks but should really switch completely to Pro/e, it's is definatly better though I found the learning curve much steeper than solidworks and I have taken maybe ten times longer to get the last few drawings done. I read a tutorial but adapt the tutorial to the drawing I want, I feel i am not wasting time, which I probably am...

I have autocad on a pentium II 300 laptop and it works great, infact I use solidworks on the laptop, I run it on a remote desktop and it works suprisingly well. I can't use pro/e over the remote desktop the display adapter in the laptop won't have it, I thought it was a driver prob but couldn't solve it; I would probably learn pro/e faster if i could sit in front of the telly and use it;-)

I used soildworks on a duron12 I built for someone with a pcchips integrated board, it worked fine if a little slow, 128 mb shared isn't quite the same as 1 gig of ram...