ROI calculator shows how much money you save

The right hardware boosts the performance of CAD applications. NVIDIA's ROI calculator lets users easily find out how many hours they will save on each project or see how short the payback period is on upgrades. For example, say you are a design engineer making $55,000 a year and you use your Dell workstation about 50% of your time on the job, which is 240 days a year and 8 hours a day. Assume that the workstation will be upgraded in three years and that you mostly design large assemblies. The existing GPU is a Quadro FX 4600 (high end), but you decide to update to a Quadro 5000, which brings your total workstation cost to $4,950. Results show: Percentage time saving — 24%; Annual man-hour saving (hours) — 235; Payback period (days) — 175; ROI — 412% and Returns per user over workstation lifespan — $20,194, among other data.