Member Avatar for sun-tzu

I have a geForce 6600, and not HD so almost anything would be an upgrade...

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mentioned needing an upgrade for Autodesk Maya; and asked for details. For anyone offering a spare card or deciding whether to accept one, the most useful information is not the brand alone but a short compatibility checklist and a quick test routine so the card will actually improve Maya performance.

Physical and system checks: confirm the board is PCI‑Express x16 (most modern cards are), measure card length and height for the case, and verify required PCIe power connectors (6/8‑pin) and PSU wattage. Note monitor outputs (DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort) and whether the card is full‑height or low‑profile. OEM/branded cards from big vendors sometimes use custom BIOSes—retail cards are easier to swap.

What matters for Maya: viewport responsiveness depends on OpenGL/driver quality and raw GPU power; large scenes and GPU renderers need more VRAM. As a rule of thumb for practical improvement: a modern card with several gigabytes of VRAM and current drivers will beat very old cards by a wide margin. Workstation lines (NVIDIA Quadro / AMD Radeon Pro) offer certified drivers and stability for heavy scenes, while consumer GeForce/Radeon cards often give better price-to-performance for modeling and viewport work.

Simple pre‑acceptance tests: have the donor boot a system with the card installed and run a 3D scene or Maya viewport—look for crashes or visual artifacts. Check the OS device listing (Device Manager / lspci) and a GPU utility to confirm memory size and clock. After acquisition, update drivers from the GPU vendor, monitor temperatures under load, and verify Maya’s viewport renderer behaves correctly. For low‑cost alternatives, surplus outlets, university IT disposals, Freecycle/Craigslist or local recycling programs often yield usable cards.

Member Avatar for Mediumcube

So what's your question?

Member Avatar for Webcs-Peter

What do you want exactly?

Member Avatar for sun-tzu

I was just hoping that someone had a card they were just going to throw out. I use Autodesk Maya and a geForce 6600 is not good enough to handle it.

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