Quick Recommendations Please...

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calpolyarc

New Member
I'm building a new system to do high quality CAD. I'm wondering if I will be ok getting an 128mb ATI FireGL card as opposed to their really high end expensive ones?! Or would I even be ok just getting the Radeon 9800 Pro 256?? I'm not going to be playing any games, and only want the high quality card to view my 3-d models, and be able orbit/pan/zoom them without it being choppy or activating deceleration. Thank you very much for your time and help! :)

ps. Is it rare that a motherboard would have an AGP Pro slot?

Todd
 
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calpolyarc

New Member
I guess I should have added that my system will be a P4 2.8 or 3.0 Ghz with 1 Gig DDR PC 3200 RAM. Thanks again.
 
Praetor

Praetor

Administrator
Staff member
The GL should be good (make sure you also have a look at offerings by Matrox and nVidia ... Wildcats might be within your budget i dunno its been awhile since ive shopped for a Wildcat/Oxygen calibre card) -- definitely a VERY BAD IDEA to get a gaming card like the 9800 both from a performance and quality perspective. If you're gonna be doing serious stuff get a serious card :)

Dunno if animation is a field you're considering and if you do, you might consider taking a Dual Xeon/Opteron setup for that (as opposed to a vid card) as all that lighting crap is CPU intensive :)
 
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calpolyarc

New Member
Thanks Praetor... So even a low end GL would be better then the 9800 huh?! There seems to be some good deals out there on the FireGL T2. Don't do animation anymore... sure miss it though! :)
 
Praetor

Praetor

Administrator
Staff member
Hell yeah, the 9800 is a very bad bad bad bad bad choice if you want to do precision stuff like what your doing simply because it wasnt designed for that. The best "combination" gaming/serious card they ever had was the Matrox Parhelia but that was a halfassed gaming card so i dunno. Its not so much the speed of the card -- its the pixel precision -- DirectX and OpenGL wont matter shit cuz u'll be using HEIDI :)
 
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