580 GTX vs 670 GTX for Autocad, 3DS max and GSketchup! HELP*

[L1qu1d]

Hey!

I'm making a design PC for my gf, and yes I know I prob should invest in a workstation card, but I actually got a 670 GTX as a present from my cousin, and I was wondering if my gf would benefit more from the 670 or the 580 GTX in her Design pc?

I kinda lost track of all the news and what card can do what, but from my understanding the 500 series are still better for GPGPU, so I don't know if that will effect her renderings better or not.

I use to have 9800 GX2 a LONG LONG time ago and ever since I sold it and stepped up to 285, 480 etc, my gf said that the rendering was still the fastest on the GX2 (which is weird because I had a Q6600 instead of an i7 920 back then.


Anyways her specs are as followed:

MObo: BIOSTAR TPower X79 Socket Intel LGA2011 Intel x79 Chipset Quad Channel DDR3 2400(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1600/ 1333 /1066 MHz HD Audio 3 x PCI-E x16 3.0 4x SATA3 6Gb/s 6x USB 3.0 ATX

CPU: INTEL - SERVER PROCESSORS XEON E5-2609 4C 2.4GHZ 10MB L3 80W TDP DDR3 1066MHZ MM#919829

Ram: Mushkin Silverline 8GB

HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green (WD7500AZRX) 750GB SATA3 6Gb/s 64MB (OEM)

PSU: Corsair Builder Series CX430 V2 430 Watt 80 PLUS Certified Power Supply (CMPSU-430CXV2

VGAs: Gigabyte (GV-N670OC-2GD) nVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Chipset (980MHz) 2GB (6008MHz) GDDR5 Dual Display 2x DVI-I/HDMI/Display Port PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card or my 580 GTX EVGA.

Thank You for the help!

Edit: Changed title so people don't think it's a comparison lol but a help question! 😛

 

[Pinhedd]

All of the GeForce cards have neutered GPGPU capabilities, these are only available on the Quadro and Tesla cards.

You should get a professional graphics card if you're building the computer for professional usage. If it's purely for a hobby it won't matter much

 

[L1qu1d]

All of the GeForce cards have neutered GPGPU capabilities, these are only available on the Quadro and Tesla cards.

You should get a professional graphics card if you're building the computer for professional usage. If it's purely for a hobby it won't matter much

Well she will be using it more for professional, but since I have an extra video card I just wanted to know which would benefit her more, even if it is 1-5% if any😛.

Looking at the Pro cards, they are very expensive! I thought that I would invest in a better CPU this way.

I was going to go for the Bulldozer from AMD for her, but just doing a brief read on those, they are a disaster!

 

[JackNaylorPE]

She can't use either card, PSU is too small.

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-670/specifications
Minimum System Power Requirement = 500W

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-580/specifications
Minimum System Power Requirement = 600W

GPGPU capabilities certainly are not neutered on all GeForce cards, this is certainly not true on the 5xx series though it is true somewhat on the 600 series.....this will not be true for "big kepler" cards released in late summer.

Here's the link for CUDA capable cards:

http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus

GeForce GTX 690 3.0
GeForce GTX 680 3.0
GeForce GTX 670 3.0
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2.1
GeForce GTX 550 Ti 2.1
GeForce GTX 460 2.1
GeForce GTS 450 2.1
GeForce GTS 450* 2.1
GeForce GTX 590 2.0
GeForce GTX 580 2.0
GeForce GTX 570 2.0
GeForce GTX 480 2.0
GeForce GTX 470 2.0
GeForce GTX 465 2.0

I was wondering if my gf would benefit more from the 670 or the 580 GTX in her Design pc?

That will depend on what she's doing. In my engineering office, all the desktops use GeForce cards w/ AutoCAD which is just fine for 2D drafting. They do just fine for moderate 3D rendering but if I was doing it more than 30 minutes a day, I'd opt for a Quadro.

The Green HD is rather slow and w/ Autodesks insistence on using storage no matter how much memory is available, this is certainly a bottleneck.

 

[Pinhedd]

There would be a substantial benefit to using a workstation card for professional use.

For starters, all GeForce Fermi and Kepler cards have their double precision floating point capabilities capped at 1/8th the performance of single precision floating point computations when the architecture is capable of performing them at 1/2. That's a four fold increase just for going to Quadro/Tesla if you use double precision.

Second, Quadro/Tesla have built in error correction. This is handy when running a simulation/render that can take hours to produce results. Tesla and Quadro chips are binned from higher quality chips and are statistically less error prone than GeForce.

Third, there are hand optimized professional driver tweaks for each CAD application that the developers pay good money to have included in the mainline driver

Fourth, the workstation cards are often overflowing with additional video memory that isn't available on consumer models.

 

[L1qu1d]

She can't use either card, PSU is too small.

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-670/specifications
Minimum System Power Requirement = 500W

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-580/specifications
Minimum System Power Requirement = 600W

GPGPU capabilities certainly are not neutered on all GeForce cards, this is certainly not true on the 5xx series though it is true somewhat on the 600 series.....this will not be true for "big kepler" cards released in late summer.

Here's the link for CUDA capable cards:

http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus

GeForce GTX 690 3.0
GeForce GTX 680 3.0
GeForce GTX 670 3.0
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2.1
GeForce GTX 550 Ti 2.1
GeForce GTX 460 2.1
GeForce GTS 450 2.1
GeForce GTS 450* 2.1
GeForce GTX 590 2.0
GeForce GTX 580 2.0
GeForce GTX 570 2.0
GeForce GTX 480 2.0
GeForce GTX 470 2.0
GeForce GTX 465 2.0

I was wondering if my gf would benefit more from the 670 or the 580 GTX in her Design pc?

That will depend on what she's doing. In my engineering office, all the desktops use GeForce cards w/ AutoCAD which is just fine for 2D drafting. They do just fine for moderate 3D rendering but if I was doing it more than 30 minutes a day, I'd opt for a Quadro.

The Green HD is rather slow and w/ Autodesks insistence on using storage no matter how much memory is available, this is certainly a bottleneck.

Sorry pasted wrong PSU Corsair Builder Series CX600 V2 600 Watt 80 PLUS Certified Power Supply (CMPSU-600CXV2)

 

[L1qu1d]

IC IC

Damn I was hopping to save some money! Any suggestions????

Prob between 300-500$ is my price range!

 

[fb39ca4]

If you already have the card, you might as well use it, and if you are not satisfied with it, then invest in a workstation card. A GTX 670 will still go quite a long ways with CADing.

 

[L1qu1d]

If you already have the card, you might as well use it, and if you are not satisfied with it, then invest in a workstation card. A GTX 670 will still go quite a long ways with CADing.

If there isn't a difference between the 670 and the 580 in cadding I'll prob keep the 670 for my stuff and give her the 580 for the cadding

Thanks so much guys!

I wish I could give all of you best answer🙁

 

[L1qu1d]

Best answer selected by L1qu1d.