9600M GT's (CAD/DCC) Quadro equivalent?

So from what I've heard, GeForce cards still have decent Open GL support, but they don't compare the Quadros in that respect.

1 - I want some suggestions as to what the 9600M GT's equivalent is on the Quadro side - I'm not talking about it's hardware siblings (770M/1700M FX), I'm talking about its CAD/DCC performance.

For example, I've heard that a 9600M GT would still be owned by a 570M FX for these purposes, so I'm wondering what card it would be comparable to in, for example an Avid environment.

2 - If the 9600M GT was soft modded, then which card would it be comparable to?

 

Nvidia quadro FX770M,there is no comparison on the geforce side in regards to mcad/DCC performance apart from a better quadro or fireGL imo.
I had an XPS M1730 with two 8800GTX's and it's performance in solidwork's was mile's worse than my M65 which had a very low powered 7400 based FX350m.....lot's of power,but didn't know how to use it because of the lacking openGL firmware optimization.

Have never had much luck soft modding geforce's or radeon's into their openGL brother's personally,have managed to get the displayed name of the GPU changed.
On dell notebook's the firmware update for quadro is done through the system bios....I did have a D610 latitude that had a precision M20 sister and the only difference was the system bios,I managed to get a forcetype bios command from another user on a forum and tried it and sure enough it changed from a D610 with X300 to a M20 with V5100 or whatever the fireGL equivalent was.

 

So I should stick with trying my best to get a Quadro, even if it's pretty low on the scale? Cause honestly, I can't go much higher than $750, and even at Dell Outlet, there's only a few choices... and M4400s start at around $850 there...what laptop do you think I should shoot for?

Oh, and I should add that Avid Media Composer requires 560M and up!

 

What exactly are you hoping for? Do you want 2D or 3D? Are you rendering or are you worried about performance during surface modeling, or assemblies?

Unless your working on large scale productions you can often get away with a surprisingly small amount of hardware, or decent consumer grade hardware.

Also, what do you plan as far as an OS, and what year programs? Many of the 3D packages have only added Vista x64 in the last year and thus if you have a 2008 or earlier copy you may end up in software GL model which can't be any worse then any other graphics card.

 

I constantly work with Adobe Suite CS4 primarily with Flash, After Effects (yes, with 3D layered transitions), and Premiere and I'm trying finally to make a transition over to Avid, but Media Composer requires 560 FX and up for an odd reason.

I suppose I'll just have to scour the net for a M4400 that's cuts below $850... Dell Outlet isn't showing many options..

 

Just remember that acceleration is relitivly primitive for CS4. All you really get is a few of the filters applied in real time. An example I've seen before is that you can better see the picture as you rotate it as apposed to getting a general idea and then getting the exact view a second or two later. Not a revolutionary thing in my mind.

Just make sure you don't give up too much in the CPU/Memory area becaues those are the traditional parts that were stressed and will continue to be for some tasks at least.

Good luck and I hope you find the perfect machine.

 

Opt for low memory and hard drive since those can be easily and cheaply upgraded.

 

yep, that's exactly what I found

 

With the applications you are using I don't think you really need a very powerful video card but more on processing speed and memory.