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I'm about to upgrade my graphics card (9500 GT). I could get 2 450's for less than 1 480. Is this a good choice? I haven't ever ran SLI, so I don't know about the efficiency of running 2 cards. Any advice is appreciated.

Unless you are a gamer you have no real need for two cards, or if you use unmentionable gpu renderer X which might make use of dual cards then it could be a option. Otherwise skip it and throw away your pennies on the 480 card.

/ Magnus

GTX580 is in the pipe.
Did you consider the new AMD cards?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rad ... ,2776.html

No gaming. My main purpose is to drive high framerates for Max and other 3D programs. I want to be able to smoothly manipulate high poly scenes. I guess I need to research what's known about the 580. Like price, and release date?

I have bad experiences with ATI cards. We used to use Fire Pro cards at my old office and they were nothing but trouble. I'll stick with Nvidia I think.

For viewport framerates just get the fastest single chip nVidia card you can.

Thanks for the advice. Now to buy or wait... the eternal question.

It's five month I wait to build my new home station.
Each month my base config change In that way i will never buy it.
At the end of the year, I dont think you will have a new generation of chip so Go Go Go Go !!!!

Now just need to choose a model...

http://www.guru3d.com/category/Videocards/

the GTX 580 NDA ends next monday... there are rumors around of a performance gain of 20% and 20% less power consumption compared to GTX 480.
... and Radeon HD6950/70 will be released on 20. Nov.
I think the performance of both Highend cards will be nearly the same... the price and power consumption will be interesting...

if you only need viewport speed get a Quadro.

I have a 480GTX and 3dsmax viewport is slow (10fps) after importing a .dwg with 65.000 triangles.
On the other hand I still have 30fps with a high-res 12.000.0000 tris import from zbrush.

I do a lot of realtime stuff based on game engines so I need the best of two worlds. A gamer card although im not a gamer heheh.

For your cases: Quadro.

I have seen low framerates for imported AutoCAD files too, even with my Quadro at my old office. But I think a comparable Quadro card is out of my budget. Plus I'd like to do some good comparisons rendering with Iray and other GPU renderers. The 480 Cuda cores sounds good.

I read on a magazine the difference between the pro cards and the gamer card (Quadro / FirePro) and the conclusion was just a matter of drivers and memory....
Grrrr!

David Solito wrote:I read on a magazine the difference between the pro cards and the gamer card (Quadro / FirePro) and the conclusion was just a matter of drivers and memory....
Grrrr!

well true.. but when using 3dsmax in DirectX mode, a geforce should be as fast as a quadro. Quadro/FirePro optimization is only for OpenGL.

Nvidia GTX 580 on November 8th:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/nvi ... ber-8/4204

Bubbaloo wrote:Nvidia GTX 580 on November 8th:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/nvi ... ber-8/4204

300 watts

dmeyer wrote:
300 watts

...i didn't notice this before.
and then you can use 4 of them in sli...