Hi, I have recently bought a Dell workstation put together by a friend and found that the graphics card seems to be inadequate to run Sketchup Pro or the Adobe Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop) and I can’t seem to upload any new drivers for it. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on this setup as I ultimately want to upgrade but it needs to function in the interim. What is the minimum cost video card recommended for 3d modelling/rendering for this system?
Dell Custom
Intel i7 CPU 2926 Mhz 4 Core
8 GB Ram
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 470
Win 10
This was the newest driver for you card on the Nvidia site:
If your current one is older I would recommend that you install the latest, even if it is more than 3 years old.
As @dezmo says, your problem might lie first with your RAM size.
Also make sure in the Nvidia control panel that SketchUp is set to use your Nvidia card instead of a possible Intel integrated video chip in your i7 CPU. In my experience any discrete graphics card is better than none. My small laptop that recently died had a puny 620M card that ran SketchUp quite OK, as did my older desktop with an ancient Quadro FX card that didn’t even fill the recommended specs.
Try to find yourself a used GTX970 and that’ll be plenty of power.
A 960 would also be fine, or a 1050. Those are somewhat popular models so you can resell them later without too much trouble.
There are some tricks & settings that can help to reducing RAM usage for Windows and Adobe, so 8GB May be okay if you follow the advice (sorry youll have to google it.)
But yes, do all your Windows and Nvidia updates first…
