T500 for autocad?

Hey guys I'm an engineering student and I'll be taking graphics in the fall and was wondering how well the Radeon 3650 would handle autocad. Would it be better for me to go with a T61 and the Quadro NVS 140M? I know the Quadro is optimized to run autocad but I’m not sure about the Radeon. I would get the W500 but that's a little too expensive and I'm still kicking myself for not getting the T61p with the 570M when it was still around. Thanks for the help.

 

the quadro nvs 140m is a really, really slow chip, and you most likely will not have a lot of fun with it when you try to work on bigger assemblies. the fx 570 would be a good choice.

concerning the radeon 3650, i guess it will handle autocad well enough, but of course opengl viewport performance would not be nearly as good as the fx 570.

so if you wanna work on opengl-based modeling apps like maya, rhino,catia, proengineer, solidworks.... you´d be better off with the quadro fx 570.

more and more companies are trying to use d3d for the viewport display, but still there are not many of them, eg 3dsmax is running in d3d. for this app, the radeon 3650 would be quite good actually. when other companies will provide d3d for their modeling / aqnimation apps is not yet very clear.
i guess after siggraph next week we´ll know more.

 

Check the outlet for a t61p

 

Hey schoko and jaredy thanks for the reply. I would love to get a fx570 but they're not selling them anymore and I've been checking the outlet everyday. Nothing has come up so far. Do you guys know how often they update it? So the 3650 isn't really meant for autocad....that's what I was worried about.

 

AutoCAD 2008/09 have Direct3D support ( btw, they don't currently support OpenGL under Vista), so consumer cards (Radeon/GeForce) are probably better choice in this case.

And yes, the HD 3650 should be fine for AutoCAD 2008/09.

 

Are you sure the CAD software you will be using is AutoCAD? I use CATIA and it doesn't do well with gaming oriented cards. It doesn't need a powerful card to run well, just a workstation oriented one.

For example, I had a 8800GTX on my home desktop and my work computer has the Quadro equivalent to a 6600GT. CATIA rendered much better on the work computer than my home computer, in fact it did really well with large assemblies.

I guess what I am trying to get at is, you don't really need a powerful graphics card for CAD, just a workstation oriented one. I don't believe the cards in the T400 and T500 are workstation oriented.

What is really important for CAD is lots of memory and CPU speed.

 

don´t mix this up... lots of memory and cpu-speed is only needed for rendering.
good graphics cards are needed to display the geometry in the viewports.

 

I'd go with the W500 if you're CAD'ing. It's got a wicked good workstation card.

 

You don't need a lot of power for CAD (especially not 2D) unless you're doing really complex assemblies with lots and lots of parts. The engineering computer labs in my school have consumer grade ATI X300 or X1300 graphics cards which are not powerful at all but I've done some work in SolidWorks and Pro-Engineer on them and never had any problems. So yea, the T500 will do just fine.