So my brother is looking to build a box for doing CAD. His budget is ~1k. I can pretty much make him a decent desktop, but where my expertise and those I normally talk to regarding hardware draws a blank is the Nvidia Quadro line or other workstation/pro cards.

What is the difference between a gamer/consumer card and a more pro workstation card?

What would someone recommend with a max of probably ~500 bucks though preferably less unless the performance sweet spot demands the higher price?

I don't think he's doing anything especially zany as I believe he intends to use this mostly for small projects.

It's been my experience that unless he'd be doing heavy 3D work just about any consumer VC is going to do just fine and he won't require anything special. What CAD does do, especially the more recent versions, is suck RAM like it's going out of style and hog the CPU. Even with that said I'd wager that anything with a couple gigs of RAM, a decent dual core processor and VC will serve him well.

The only real difference between the consumer and pro level cards is driver support and "certification" for working with the various CAD/3D apps.

Ah are those differences worth it Tkam? If not then we'll just go consumer and load it up on the RAM as nate suggests.

Nope they aren't at all, and if you run into any apps that happen to require the "certified" driver crap you can actually download the pro drivers and hack them very easily to run on the consumer cards.

I'm with nate go with a quad core cpu and load it up ram.

Nod.. thanks guys.