Quadro choice dilemma for heavy Photoshop user

iangreenhalgh

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I just bought a refurbished HP z400 workstation with a Xeon W3530, 24Gb RAM and an Nvidia NVS 300 Gfx card. While cleaning out my parts cupboard I discovered I have a pair of Quadro FX 3450 cards. The z400 has two PCIx x16 slots for dual cards. I looked up the specs of the two types of Quadro and am confused as to which would be faster for my needs - no gaming, just home office use and lots of Photoshop. The FX3450 has 256mb of GDDR3 a 256bit memory bus at 900Mhz and a Gb/sec of 32, no CUDA. The NVS 300 has 512mb of GDDR3, a 64bit memory bus and a Gb/sec of 12.6 but also 16 CUDA cores.

So before I go mad trying to work out what will be fastest for me, can anyone help me decide what will give me the best performance - the current NVS 300 or swap it out for one or two of the FX 3450s?
 

RobCrezz

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To be perfectly honest, they are all rubbish cards and will give a very small benefit to your Photoshop works. A fairly cheap GTX 750 from ebay would be more than 50x faster.

If thats not desirable, I would stick with the NVS 300. Its about 5 years newer, even though it appears much less powerful in specs it should support the much newer functions.
 

iangreenhalgh

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Well, I'm still running Photoshop CS5, and not seen the need (or had the cash) to upgrade to a newer version. As far as I know, CS5 doesn't use CUDA. The plugins I use are Nik EFEX SilverFX, ColourFX and Dfine, no idea if they use CUDA. Only other applications I use are all common things - Skype, Chrome, Thunderbird, uTorrent, not much else really. I'm still using Win 7 64bit, never bought an upgrade as Win 8 was horrible and I've never tried win 10, 7 still does what I need.

With this extra info on my needs, is there any benefit to swapping the NVS 300 for the FX 3450?

Will I see any benefit from fitting both of the FX 3450s?

Given I am on a very low budget, any suggestions for a more modern card that would be much faster for Photoshop CS5?

I only bought this HP z400 because my current desktop died, it has an AMD a8-5500 with the in-built gfx and 16mb of RAM, using a 1tb SATA drive on win 7, so I'm expecting to see quite a leap in performance with the new HP which I have bought an SSD for, just for Win 7 and apps, using my old SATA drive for data.

I paid 115ukp for the z400 with Xeon w3530, 24gb RAM, NVS 300, DVD-R, no HDD, no OS, add to that 27ukp for a Kingston 60gb SSD. Should be quite a lot faster than my old machine I think.
 

iangreenhalgh

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I've bought a Xeon L5630 for 5.10ukp to replace the W3530 in my z400, not really a speed upgrade, but it makes a lot of sense to replace a 130w chip with a 40w one, it will run a lot cooler and quieter and use a lot less power as apart from when I'm running heavy filters in photoshop, it will hardly ever tax the processor.