Advice on new Gfx Card for old motherboard

Hardware Hub GPU
1

Hi All,

I have a workstation with a quadro fx 4800 that is a few years old now and wanted to see if i could swap out the old pro card for a newer gaming card. The motherboard is a Supermicro X7DWA-N Workstation Motherboard (dual cpu).

 

I can't find the motherboard listed on pc parts picker so i have no clue what would be the fastest card i could put in it that would be an upgrade.

 

Any advice on a newer gfx card or a place that i can lookup compatible cards at least would be very much appreciated.

 

3DJ

2

should work with any PCI express card.

but with DDR2 800 memory, i duno how much performance you can get out of it.

3

ok cool. I'm looking at a 680 or 770. The 770 seems to be significantly cheaper and better performance but is there something i'm missing?

 

Would either of these cards work with my system?

4

no way dude, your system is going to bottleneck those cards like crazy

5

760 would be the right spot. There is no difference between ddr2 and ddr3 on the lga775/771 platform (like <5%). Of course there will be a little bottleneck but it's acceptable and the performance loss is nothing major. 770 is better overall than a 680, and has a much higher bandwidth.

What exactly do you intend to do with it? For 3d design, nvidia is the way to go.

6

are you serious? you dont think a system with a 800mhz memory bus wont bottle neck a 760?

 

7

ddr2.... well i would spend that much on that motherboard man unless you plan on upgrading that soon to.  most games cant use more than 2 threads let alone multiple processors. for the sake of bottlenecking that system you could probably get away with a 750

8

Hey TropiKo, thanks for the feedback. I am a 3D designer and use the machine mostly for modelling as i now have access to a 10U render farm. I run 3DS max 2015, solidwroks and ZBrush with a bit of mudbox and Maya. the old Quadro is only DX9 in hardware, Nvidia used to have maxtreme drivers that made a huge difference in realtime performance but Max uses a new type of display driver (nitrous) that works across pro and gamer cards.

I like the suggestion of a 760 and especially the price point to performance ratio.

3DJ 

 

9

He's not looking to game it's a workstation.

10

thanks for all the advice. I am borrowing a 680 from work and will try it out. I'll let you all know how it goes and do a comparison in 3DS max for FPS and all that good stuff.

 

11

Hey all,

 

I borrowed a 670 and 680 to test in my rig. Both the cards showed a significant increase in the 3d mark scores but in practical tests using both games and my 3d software there was no significant increase. In fact in 3ds max with higher polycount scenes the gamer cards were slower.

So yeah, the rest of the system throttled the shit out of the cards. Dissapointing but at least i could test it out without dropping hundreds of dollars on a new card.

 

cheers all