Old Quadro FX vs new Geforce GTX

Stick with your current card. The GTX 460, while a good card, will not beat your FX 4500 X2 in CAD modeling. My workstation at work is an old P4 with a Quadro FX 1000, and it beats my home PC (E8400 with GTX 460 1GB) in terms of CAD modeling. Your card is still good as a workstation GPU, I don't see a reason to upgrade.

Really? thats interesting? The reason im thinking of upgrading is i dont think my 4500 is too well at the moment. my friend has exactly the set up as me yet i have 8gb of RAM and he has only 4GB. He does have his water cooled though so it never gets as hot as mine. when I start putting my machine under load, ie rendering in the background and modeling at the same time, it seems to lag a bit, particularly when spinning my 3D models.

Will cooling mine more help with the problem maybe, i dont know enough about that area to know if heat slows things down.

Another option is to buy a FX4600 off ebay for the same price if i do have a problem with my card. thing is i dont know how to test my card other than compare it with my friends and notice that occasionally the picture freezes and i have to restart.

How much dust has built up on the card? That may be causing the card to heat up more than your friend's... Any chance you guys could swap cards to see how they perform?

last night we did a quick test. I gave him one of my 3d drawings and we started to render at the same time. ( our PC's are in the same room, student house share). It turns out ive been a bit paranoid, when rendering the time left was alot less on mine, i think due to the extra RAM in mine. Also spinning the model was almost the same when it came to the stuttering. His was still considerably cooler, but we think this is due to his have a corsair H50 cpu cooler. Not only is this cooling his cpu better it is also freeing up loads of space in his case so the heat is not building up and air is moving better.

So I took the plunge ( it was late and you do funny things when your tired) and ordered a swiftech h20-320 water cooling kit. One trouble though i ordered it through pixmania, who were a lot cheaper ans it said in stock. This morning i check the order status and theres a 8-10 day wait on it ( in stock my ar*e) never mind just got to be patient. Thanks for the advice so far firebird and ill post results when i finally get my cooler.

sorry about all the bad grammar and spelling, Ive been working hard and i'm a bit tired