Upgrade workstation Quadro M2000 or M4000 advise please

[Tom J]

Hi Folks
Thought that my set up is fairly good for what I was using - Solidworks
Desktop worksation: i5 16GB RAM 256 SSD 2TB HDD G-Force GTX-660 win7 pro
Mobile workstation: i7 16GB 128GB SSD 1TB HDD Quadro M1000 win10

Just start using SolidCam and realized that system struggle with vector calculation (ie text engraving)
My question is about choice between those two cards (M2000 vs M400) mostly when using Solidcam.
Is it worth spend double on M4000?
Did not run solidcam yet on my laptop with m1000 so that is why I ask.

Thanks in advance
Tom

[Tom J]

http://download.solidcam.info/it/solidcam_recommended_systems.html
just wonder why they recommend K-series which are not listed on current Nvidia website
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/quadro-desktop-gpus-uk.html

[Boyan Silyavski]

Are you sure you have windows and all set right? I use NX on a 7 year old PC without a glitch, same goes for my i5 laptop with standard 1G graphic card, nothing fancy. Some programs are buggy / Sketchup/ so whatever you do they are slow. Open your task manager in windows and see what happens there meanwhile. If all is not 100% , then its software fault or bugs, not hardware

[Tom J]

My win7 is spotless starts in 6sec, no bugs, station is only used for Solidworks and SCam.
SW run sweet even with real view, however solidcam is slow and need time to calculate -sometimes like 2min (I often check if still responding in task manager)

[Boyan Silyavski]

Great! May it be then that you have to disable some kind of model rendering in the Solidcam options? I don't know the program , but many programs have tricks in the sleeve to speed things up. But some times the sad truth maybe that some programs simply are buggy and dont use well the PC resources. like Sketchup for example, 3 years versions and the same slow performance. Which starts to get annoying when you have entire CNC machine drawn using it.

[Ger21]

It says it uses DirectX (Direct3D), so I would think that a good gaming card would work fine. I'd try a GTX 970 or 980, for a lot less money.
I also don't think that toolpath calculation is GPU limited.
How old is your i5?

[Tom J]

3years old
i5-3570k 3.4GHz 4 cores

[Greeny]

The graphics card driver compatability page gives a more comprehensive list of tested cards including the m2000 & m4000 (the m1000 is not listed)
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/videocardtesting.html

Might be worth trying the solidworks performance test. The listed results should give you a rough idea of what people are getting with similar systems to your current setup & if you added 2000 / 4000
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/shareyourscore.htm

cheers

[Tom J]

M1000 is listed and is fine - this is mobile workstation
19468
my concern is related to desktop workstation with i5
Simply do not want waste money on higher card if I won't use its potential.

[Greeny]

I'm aware your concern is with adding an m2000/m4000 which is why I suggested looking at the benchmark results for those cards, to get an estimation of the difference they make on otherwise similar systems.

I know it's not the answer you're looking for, but thought it might help give you a rough idea.

[m.marino]

You are using a mobile platform so my advise on this is rather useless. I use a D20 with a Quadro K4000 and a Tesla C7020 which gives me 9GB RAM plus being able to couple the GPU of the Tesla to the Quadro for rendering processing. SolidCAM is known to bog down non mobile workstations depending on config and RAM available. I am sorry but don't have a lot of info to offer.

Michael