Which GPU?

[EJH]

I am going to order a W520 and have a question about which GPU to get. Other than the usual browsing and MS Office tasks I am a heavy user of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and IDimager. Is the $250 for the NVIDIA Quadro 2000M upgrade worthwhile or is that primarily useful for gamers?

[hazart]

Recent versions of Photoshop do use GPU acceleration.

I'd get the 2000M as it's ~50% faster than the 1000M and the W520's GPU is a non-upgradeable part.

[PanEuropean]

EJH:

I have a W520 with the Quadro 2000 card and I use Adobe CS4.  I don't know whether Photoshop that comes with Adobe CS4 (Photoshop version 11, which is not the very latest release) takes full advantage of everything that the snazzy graphics card can do, however, I can tell you that it runs a heck of a lot faster on the new W520 than it did on my previous notebook, which was a W500.  Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that I am running the 64 bit version of Photoshop on the W520... I was running the 32 bit version on the W500.

But, 32 bit vs 64 bit notwithstanding,  my recommendation is 'go for it', get the faster of the two video cards.  You'll probably keep the notebook for a few years, even if your current version of PS doesn't take full advantage of the graphics card, the next version of PS that you upgrade to probably will.

Michael

[harrisb]

I'm almost positive that CS4 supports the 2000M card in OpenGL. CS5 certainly does.

[richk]

As far as I can tell, you will find no difference unless you play "splatter games", do full-motion video editing or run video stress test diagnpstics. The nVidia boards run hotter and use more power. Just my 2 cents