Good morning,

We're on the verge of getting new computers in my company's art department. We do the usual heavy Photoshop, Coreldraw, and Carrara (no animation, but maybe in the future) for product label production and visualization. We're getting into more web work - Dreamweaver and Flash, with the possibility of video down the road.

Our current box (the better of two machines) has a Xeon 3.2 with 2 GB ram and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 - 256 MB, 4 years old (the other is older). We want to go to quad-core processors with 4 GB ram (limited by company wide XP license, aw shucks) and are looking at the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 with 768 MB, among others. We don't need super high-end stuff but would like upper mid-range 3D capabilities. Our current system is quite adequate, but anything new will blow it's socks off.

Any thoughts and recommendations? Monitor-wise, does anyone use Viewsonic's VP2650wb, looks pretty sweet.

Thanks for any input,
Lumpy

Well, I just built a new box for 3D work.  Here are the specs.

** CPU:    **                  AMD Phenom II x4 955, black box edition (Top of the line.)

** Motherboard:**   MSI 790FX-GD70

** Case:    **                 Antec 1200 Full Tower case.

** Memory:     **         8GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 DRAM Dimms

** Sound Card:**       Creative Labs X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro PCIE card.

** Video Card:**        XFX ATI Radeon HD 4870x2 PCIE HDMI Dual Slot card (This one card has two complete high end video systems on it that operate in tandem.  Blazingly fast)

** Hard Drives:**       7x Seagate 1.5TB (1TB=1000GB), SATA II Barracuda performance series drives with 64MB Cache. (Yes, I put in 7 of them.)

** Optical Drive: **    Asus Dual Density DVD –RW Burner with Lightscribe.

** Power supply :**  Kingwin Mach 1 1000Watt Modular Power Supply.

** CPU Cooler : **      Thermaltake SpinQ

** Display:**                LG Flatron W2361V 23” Flat Panel LCD Monitor

** Input: **                   Logitech Wave wireless Keyboard and Laser mouse combo.

** Fan Controller: ** NZXT  Sentry LX Front Panel Fan and Temp control panel with full LCD speed and temp displays.

** OS: **                        I currently can choose from 4 OS’ to boot into.  Windows XP Pro 32Bit, Windows Vista 32Bit, Windows Vista 64Bit, and the Release Candidate of Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit.  (Win 7 is great.  It beats the hell out of XP and Vista.

I will never again tough a Viewsonic monitor.  They used to be great, but sadly both the hardware and the company who makes it, have both gone downhill fast.  I have a 23" widescreen monitor less than 18 months old and it's dead.  And it wasn't even all that great before it died.  As for the company.  Every time I had to call their support dept. because of a problem with it, I ended up one step closer to another heart attack.  It's horrible and they couldn't care less about what the problem was.  They just follow the script like good little herd beasts, then tell you it's either out of warranty or that it needs to be replaced.  Oh and NEVER give them your credit card number.  When I had to RMA it almost the same day I got it from TigerDirect, they told me they needed it to cross ship, or I would be out of a monitor for weeks.  I, like a trusting idiot, gave it to them.    was assured that no charges would be put on the card unless they didn't receive the bad unit back.  I sent it out priority the same day.

Two days later I look at my bank statement online to find that they DID charge my card... $300..  TWICE!!!   This of course put me over my balance and I hav another $200 or so in overdraft fees.  It took three calls to my bank, a wasted 4 hours of phone time with Viewsonic, and 2 trips to the bank in person to get the overdraft charges removed and to get a full chargeback on the money they basically stole without authorization.  I also changed my card number which was a major hassle.

Now I have a great LG Flatron W2361V widescreen LCD.  It's great and has great service.  I have gotten into the habit of cold calling a company's tech support line with a made up problem to see what they are like before I buy their product.  LGs people were smart, well trained, and you could actually understand what they were saying.  Plus LG is relatively inexpensive.

When paired with my XFX ATI Radeon HD 4870x2 dual core GPU card, with 2GB of RAM, it looks intense.  One word though.  Like all higher end cards, it is a bit noise because of the huge ducted fan.  It also needs both a 6 and an 8 pin PCIE power cable.  It takes up two slots too.  I am thinking of getting a second one and crossfiring them.  My mobo can handle up to 4 GPUs so why not. LOL

I gave up on Nvidia quite a while back.  Too expensive and too buggy.

Hey, Sparrowhawk.
Thinking of my next purchase:    Have you tried your Radeon video card with photoshop CS4?
What does photoshop think of it?  (CS4 does NOT like my Nvidia card.)
thanks for any info

From what I have used it for so far, it seems to work fine with both Photoshop CS4 and Paint Shop Pro X2.  And Carrara loves it.

Thanks people. It's good to hear from "users" as opposed to "reviewers".

The Radeon 4870 might be overkill for our needs. How about the better ATI FirePro cards, like the V8700?

Also, I read somewhere that 1 GB on the GPU should do quite nicely for a 3D program like Carrara. Whadaya think?

Yes.  it would be fine at 1GB, but each core on the card has a seperate 1GB memory block all to itself.  Basically it's 2 crossfired 4870 cores, each with it's own RAM on the same card.  I haven't used the FirePro cards, but the XFX 4870x2 only cost about $250 at Newegg on sale.

I'm currently using the ATI HD 4670
Awesome cheap card, dual 4670's would be even better.
But of course I do like to game with my system too.

Quadro's are crazy expensive and I'm on a budget most of my life.
So anyone considering budget? the new 4600's are great budget cards and can be overclocked.

Take your savings and invest in a Cintiq!!!!