Nvidia: Quadro VS 9300M VS 8600 GT

I am heading off to college (doesn't start until October) and my college suggests a minimum video card of 8600GT.

I ordered a Lenovo with a 9300M in it but it looks like I'm going to be canceling the order, so I am back to looking at graphics cards.

I am going to be using 3D programs like CAD and Solidworks so I need some power. I see that Nvidia is championing their Quadro FX series for autodesk but how does that stack up to consumer cards like the 9300, 8600 GT, and whatever the newest high end card is these days w/o SLI?

Also, does the Quadro FX support DirectX10? I want something that will work great for 3D modeling but I am still going to do some gaming in my free times.

 

I would recomend the Sager NP2096 because it has the 9600m but that is not a Quadro

 

Thanks for suggesting a different brand for my notebook. My main concern (atleast in this thread) is the graphics cards. How close are the Quardo to the 8600 GT, and was I even close to a 8600 GT with my 9300 (from what I have read, I was quite a bit under)?

 

Which quadro?

 

Quadro FX 570M and up should get you what you need

 

NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M

 

The FX 570m is the same card as the 8600m GT GDDR3, with driver and vbios optimizations. So it will do slightly worse in games and much better in 3D applications that aren't game, due to the aforementioned optimizations.

 

Have any idea how close the 9300m was to the 8600 GT?

 

Less than half the performance. Probably a lot less.

 

The 9300M is a die shrunked version of the 8400M, so that's less than 50% of 8600M GT's power .

 

For Solidworks,buy the FX quadro,in my experience,geforces suck with it....although they do work....sort of.

Just an example,I had a M65 with piddly little FX350m [7400go] and it utterly raped the performance of the XPS M1730 [8800 sli] I bought after it with solidworks.......had to use software openGL half the time on the XPS because lines/ model faces wouldn't display properly or were missing,plus refreshing/rotating was painfully slow......obviously completely lopsided the other way for games.

Your choices are basically Dell,Lenovo,HP for FX quadro or FireGL powered notebooks....haven't used a fireGL powered pc for solidworks,but apparently they work very well.

Forget 3dmark scores or gaming performance,it means nothing with openGL MCAD software like solidworks.

If you have enough money,buy the precision M4400 with FX770M,its good with games AND solidworks,or the equivalent HP/Lenovo if you don't like dell.

My 2 cents