New video card

[scottbuckel]

The video card in my computer is creating problems intermittently, so I am thinking about replacing it prior to it completely dying. Currently I have an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 - I routinely use two LCD monitors. My computer is a Quad core @ 2.4GHz with 6gb RAM.

I use Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and starting to use After Effects CS5 and Premier Pro. I do not play games or do any 3D work.

I am kind of thinking about replacing the card with the same card, but would consider purchasing a more modern card that may be more capable. My budget is maybe $225 or so.

Thanks for your help,

Scott

[stephenpinn]

If it were for me I would choose an NVidia 560 or 570 series card. I don't know current pricing but I believe they are in the range you specified. There are several vendors that build cards using that chipset I have used EVGA, MSI, PNY and have had good luck with them. EVGA has the feature of allowing you to upgrade your purchase within some period of time, although I have never taken advantage of it I also thought it was a nice customer service offering.

Amazon, Frys, Microcenter usually carry these brands.

I think you will be very pleased with the performance and quality, running 2 monitors is not an issue with any of these and in some cases you can run 3 without having to add anything other than cables :)

Good luck and enjoy

[Rson]

Newegg.com - XFX HD-695X-CNDC Radeon HD 6950 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card with Eyefinity

2gb ram, latest chipset and a rebate!! I really like the XFX cards.

[scottbuckel]

Stephen and Rich - thanks for the ideas. I just placed an order with Newegg - although a little greater than my budget I ordered the one Rich recommended. I had a couple of friends that I contacted and they recommended the same card as Rich which gave me confidence to order it.

Scott

[stephenpinn]

Originally Posted by scottbuckel

Stephen and Rich - thanks for the ideas. I just placed an order with Newegg - although a little greater than my budget I ordered the one Rich recommended. I had a couple of friends that I contacted and they recommended the same card as Rich which gave me confidence to order it.

Scott

You cant go wrong with either, I tend to sway a little more towards nvidia because the cuda development environment is becoming very well adopted and rich while the OpenCL environment (at this time) has only recently come into it's own enough to have developers write to it. OpenCL, I believe, will most likely supersede other environments eventually.

Anyhow, cant go wrong two good vendors

[anjy834u]

XFX cards have become pretty costlier. They cost as much as $160. That is pretty insane i feel.

[EstelleWebber]

Unless you do rendering, there is no need to go into the "professional" line up of cards (like Quadro). Any GeForce X50+ series will do the job more than perfect.