upgrading 9262 from quadro fx 1600m to quadro fx 3700m

I just sent an email to xoticpc about trading in my current quadro fx 1600m for the quadro fx 3700m/ seems like they don't do trade-ins...

anyone have any suggestions for getting the 3700m for the cheapest amount? I can't find it on newegg or ebay or any of those...

I thought xoticpc's 'user upgradeable' meant they would do trade-ins? anyone else have the same thought?

it was a $45 upgrade for my quadro fx 1600m, and it's now a $270 upgrade for the quadro fx 3700m... so it should cost me around $225 theoretically but that never seems to work out


anyone with this card have praise on how good it is? preferably someone using maya or intensive modelling


thanks in advance

 

are you in graphic design? why dont you go Geforce series?

 

user-upgradeable.... means more like you can do it yourself.

as for the price of the Quadro 3700M.... its hard to find it anywhere since it just came out.... you have to go through a Clevo vendor.

You can contact the usually Clevo vendors that will sell you upgrades:
- www.rjtech.com
- www.eurocom.com
- Sager & Pro-Star (might require you to prove ownership of one of their systems before they will sell it to you)

 

doing graduate architecture in california, our school is intensively pushing digital modeling in addition to the actual making of it as well

im already experiencing some sluggishness with the 1600m, seems to be the bottleneck of my setup as of now, as the processor is doing a near perfect job of what I need, ram is more than enough, and hdd is plenty of storage

def not going to go geforce, quadro series helps with the amount of workstation tweaking i can do to it


as for selling the quadro fx 1600m, any suggestions on where to do that since xotic won't purchase it?

 

You can try Eurocom. They have it for an upgrade for 1195 CDN, which translates to roughly 960 USD right now. The FX1600 is worth 645 CDN, which is roughly equivalent to 520 USD. They do take in trade-ins, but I wouldn't expect anything close to that value. At any rate, it will probably cost quite a fair bit to upgrade.

You can try emailing them and see if they're willing to offer you a better price.

 

Could you explain the "sluggishness" you are experiencing and why you think the 1600M is the bottleneck? Since you're doing arch I assume you're working in 3dsmax?

 

sure, the sluggishness occurs while orbiting/ jagged movement,
this is working in maya for modeling and rhino for drawings

I have some models with upwards of 30,000's of polygons (not sure if your familiar with maya, but once a model is converted to 'SubD' it has to be converted back to polygons to render in maya, and then converted to nurbs to be put in rhino for drawings)

the subD's arent the problem but the conversion back to poly's, which breaks the model into so many pieces

even with the anti-aliasing and quality turned down low it still experiences some slowdown, they are just enormous files, with multiple iterations of each model in each file (around 20-30+)

got a quote back from xotic, $1050 for the fx 3700m and the 1600m sells for around $550...

i think the 1600m is the bottleneck because it is definitely not the cpu, and the ram is holding up just fine


i installed some video card drivers from laptopvideo2go, a while back

recently i have been experiencing more problems i.e. when i attempt to select a face, it freezes up a little before it allows me to select it (that should not be the video card but a different problem i assume)

perhaps i should try out some new drivers, im using 178.15 right now

 

the 1600M only has a 128-bit memory interface... which can handle average CAD and 3D modeling fine... but you definitely need a 256-bit memory interface.

Since you are using Maya, you do not have to spend that much to get a 3700M... you might be better off getting:
- Quadro 2700M
- Geforce 9800M

it will be cheaper and still do your work fine... since those cards are high-end.

I do not think the 3700M is worth it (its got 16 more shaders than the 9800M GTX), unless if you have the money or need it for Quadro/FireGL-specific software (like SolidWorks).

 

Well you're really not going to see any improvements by going to the 3700M. The only way it would make a huge improvement is if you are upgrading for hardware rendering purposes. Otherwise, you're not really stressing/utilizing your gpu for basic maya work. You should be just fine with the 1600M.

I work in feature film and this is not uncommon a problem. Sometimes it has to due with the fact that a scene can contain millions of polys, but in your case it sounds like a driver conflict. Since you're running the latest laptop2go drivers, that driver version isn't certified for maya. You need to go to autodesk's hardware qualified list for your version of maya, then check out the nvidia driver version that was tested. Then download that driver version from laptop2go and test it.

At home I also run a quadrofx 1300 and the 1600M definitely outclasses it...my 1300 has only 256mb ddr2 and about half as many cuda processors. However, I don't have these probs and I work with some meshes that are up to a few million polys.

Check out your driver and hopefully that solves it!

 

Also, there are some nice settings in maya to help with tumbling if you have a huge geo count. In your viewport under "shading" turn on "interactive shading" and then open up the option box for it. now you can set the "interactive shading mode" to either shaded/wireframe/bounding box/points so when you tumble, the geo changes to your selection and allows faster/better tumbling. I would recommend bounding box because that will be the fastest. The others won't help as much.

 

Hey thanks for the responses, sounds like a better choice to not get the 3700 as of now- i recommended a sager to my friend and he has a quadro 2700fx in his, ill see how my scenes work on his machine/

do you by chance have any insight on rendering with mental ray in maya?
because of the q9650 i can basically real-time render while orbiting with mayas IPR production window, it constantly renders each tweak of a material or light to the camera view - but it can only be run at pretty low quality to be smooth although that's pure cpu power, so i suppose there isn't too much tweaking to be done other than going into the specific mechanics of the render engine

I downloaded the newest drivers, just don't have time to install them right now but i'll let you know how it goes

 

Yea I actually have a lot of experience with mental ray...the speed of IPR depends on the complexity of your scene/shaders/lighting. IPR is pretty limited though b/c it doesn't support ray tracing and advanced lighting/rendering like indirect illum (GI,FG, IP). It usually makes a lot of sense to just render half/third res with anti-aliasing of -2 and 0 to get a good preview. That way you can get a good idea of how the lighting looks and then launch high(er) res renders when you're ready. Otherwise, you just waste too much time waiting on high res renders while you're working with the lighting setup/texs. And don't get too carried away with raytracing and the amount of relfection/refraction rays...that can def slow down a render and you can oversample by going way too high. Good Luck

 

yup that sounds about right, only problem for me right now is transparency, definitely slows it down but degrading the settings for preview helps a lot

i'm actually having a problem selecting face/vertex/edge or just simply selecting object mode for some mesh's that are pure transparency- the poly count of those are extremely small

also if I minimize maya or go into another program for a minute or two- it freeze stutters for about 3 seconds before i can hit F to frame the camera... not sure what the problem is but it seems to have only occured when shaders are applied to the mesh's/ i did upgrade to the latest certified drivers (ms whql, are there specific drivers that are autocad certified that would be better?)

Edit: I've narrowed the problem to when the attribute editor is active, displaying all the stats and data about the selected mesh-- it seems to stutter on calculation of the data... it is a recent problem though so i'm not too sure whats going on

it is not orbiting/ the gpu at all, but when i make the program think, hrm


i also tried to get the autodesk/nvidia certified drivers and there are none for the quadro fx 1600m surprisingly... anyone running stable drivers for that card who does 3d work? i'm currently using 176.37 / vista x64