Graphics Card Recommendations?!

[br3ttman]

We're building at least 3 new workstations at our office, trying to optimize them for our Industrial Designers using a lot of KeyShot, significant amounts of Solidworks and ProE (more surfacing, less large assemblies), and a lot of Adobe CS5 (primarily Photoshop & Illustrator).  As such we're looking at a mix of stations with i7-2600 quad core and i7-980 six core systems, possibly with overclocking to optimize KeyShot rendering. 

However, I'm stuck making recommendations for graphics cards for these machines?  CS5 takes advantage of Cuda cores so we're targeting somewhere around the NVidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards.  Do any of you have other recommendations?  I've been told NVida Quadro cards for engineering and design, but based on our workflow and level of graphics intensity, I don't know if we'd really realize the value in the more expensive Quadro cards (obviously not in relation to Keyshot, but what about for these other programs?).

Any insight as to what level of graphics cards would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

[Robb63]

I know the Quadro cards are licensed for Solidworks and Pro-E which means some features of that software will only be available with those graphic cards. I think in Solidworks the Quadro's allow you to work in "RealView" with all materials rendered while you work (not sure about Pro). If that feature isn't important to you then it might not be worth ponying up the money for the Quadro's

[br3ttman]

Thanks Robb63,

Yes, I've heard the same thing regarding Solidworks RealView graphics.  I've created a home system with an Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 card, and I've been flying with large part files and assemblies in both ProE and Solidworks.  I haven't tried RealView yet with Solidworks so I could test that.  ProE has a "Realtime Rendering" mode and the graphics response slows down, but mainly when I get into larger assemblies and lots of transparency.