Hello everyone!

I am about to buy new CAD workstations, as our current solutions are getting rather dated.

We currently use Dell T7500 series workstations.

I wanted to know what others have purchased along the lines of new hardware.

Lately, I had my eyes on the Precision 5000 line of workstations, however the graphics card offerings are lack-luster.  This blog mentions the Quadro P2000 as a good graphics card for general use.

I have read up on this, and I know that the graphics card doesn't really have much weight on overall performance; that the CPU clock speed and Cache really make the difference.

Cards that are available for the Dell that I want:

Quadro NVS 510

Quadro NVS 310

Quadro NVS 315

Quadro P1000

Quadro P600

Quadro P400

The specifications on the above mentioned cards are not that impressive at all, mainly for the lack of CUDA cores.  Is this even a big deal?  I have read that Solidworks doesn't really utilize the full power of the installed graphics card anyhow, so why even bother getting a decent Quadro card, other than for the built in ECC video memory?

What I know for sure:

* You want the fastest CPU clock rate you can afford

* You want as much CPU cache that you can afford

* You want at least 4 cores, more than 4 wont really make much of a difference

* SSD (already using them on the T7500's)

Any anecdotal information is greatly appreciated.