SFF pc needed for CAD

[Stephen B]

I hope your LCD scales well or is low resolution because at the moment its a pig of a game to get decent frame rates on.

sadly well aware of the grunt needed for said game, will obviously have to drop the quality somewhat, but hope to run at native res on the lcd, and theres always UT3 and Quake Wars as a plan B

will be putting the fx1400 on forums when new card arrives

[freddie]

all good, but the graphics card isn't strong on CAD. for nvidia you have the quadro range though ati has the newer workstation class cards out. apparantly even the lowest end card £150ish i think is meant to have performance over what £500 cards just 1 generation ago had.

i agree also with more power. CAD is cpu and graphics intensive, might as well have a slightly beefier psu to not stress it too much.

[hotpurple]

Most CAD apps don't use most of the features of the GFX cards available, and are very geometry limited, rather than texturing. The new DX10 cards fare very well as the universal shaders can all be used on geometry instead of texturing.

Also, most CAD apps are CPU bound, you will see much better performance on a faster processor and a lower class gfx card. At work my CPU (X6800) is at 100% (or 50% when the app is only single thread aware) almost all the time. The GFX card has no problem at any point (FX1700). My advice would be fast cpu, nvidia gfx card (better OGL performance), and loads of ram (3-4GB). Is your version of CATIA X64 or X86? If it's X86, make sure that it will work on X64 if you plan to use it. If you don't plan to use it, don't bother with more than 3gb ram as you can't use more than that really due to the limitations of 32bit windows.

Most apps would be ok with 2gb unless you are pushing it with large assemblies or complicated geometry.

Chris