Graphics Card Help for Dell Workstation

[creighton.north]

Hey Guys,

I'm looking for helping with upgrading my graphics card on my Dell Precision M4800 workstation. Currently I'm running with a NVIDIA Quadro K1100M. It's decent, but I'm a graduate in architecture school and need to run pretty intensive software, such as Revit and Lumion. Lumion recommends some pretty hefty specifications for the software, as follows:

Graphics card	High-end graphics card (at least 8,000 PassMark points)
Graphics card memory	6 GB or more
Graphics card examples	NVIDIA GTX 1060 (6 GB memory), Quadro K6000)

The K1100M clocks in at a little over 1000 passmark points. I've been looking for upgrades, but without having much expertise here I wanted to look for advice to make sure I got a card that would fit in the workstation I had as well as come somewhere close to the requirements I'm looking for. A potential I was looking at was the Quadro K4200, but I still was not sure if that would fit in my M4800, and if there were higher end options I'd love to look into them.

If anyone has some suggestions I'd love to hear them! Thanks!

[David (PassMark)]

This machine is a laptop right?

Typically laptops have very limited (or no) video card upgrade options. They are very space and (electrical) power constrained. You would need to check with Dell about what upgrades are available. But typically Dell would prefer to sell you a new machine than maintain the old ones.

You might be better off selling the machine and buying a desktop machine.

[creighton.north]

This machine is a laptop right?

Typically laptops have very limited (or no) video card upgrade options. They are very space and (electrical) power constrained. You would need to check with Dell about what upgrades are available. But typically Dell would prefer to sell you a new machine than maintain the old ones.

You might be better off selling the machine and buying a desktop machine.

Yes it's a mobile workstation, basically just a bigger laptop with higher processing and CPU ability. I will check with Dell but I figured it might be the case that there wasn't much room for upgrade.