I bought it. I installed it. I took it out and put the old one in - because the old one was faster.
In 2002, the MSI card won an award from Tom's Hardware. I waited for the price to come down, and bought it.
It works good, but slows down with large geometries (e.g. Solidworks part bigger than 15 MB).
I bought the ATI card, the "All-in-Wonder" thing with the TV tuner on the card.
Strangely, the ATI card scores much higher than the older MSI card on a game benchmark (Aquamark 3, 60,000 for the ATI, 20,000 for the MSI).
But - so what ? In practice, the ATI card is dramatically slower.
I went to the Solidworks website to see if there was a Solidworks-specific driver or something.
The installation procedure on the new ATI card was glitch-free, that is, "plain vanilla".
In the short term, it's back to the nVidia 5600 card.
The rest of the system - Pentium 4 3 GHz, Seagate Serial ATA 120 GB drive, 4 x 512 Mushkin low-latency (2-2-2-5) memory.
Questions -
- Is there a trick to installing the ATI card, where you deviate from the default procedure, to make it work for Solidworks ?
- What other recent-vintage video cards are Solidworks users using ?
Thanks !