okay since i know something about this i'm gonna help ya with this, first of all i need to know what kind of modeling he does, is it high poly, scenes, single assets, modeling for games or models for the portfolio or for high poly art. the lot ya know. i work with it myself and i can tell you that as soon as you reach 200.000 tris it's gonna lag and render times are gonna be a bitch, basicly the more powerfull the card the better but it all depends on the task and the complexity of the models. i can get along with my current laptop card which is a 9650 gt and that is gonna be good for a little while with the kind of tasks that i do (game models etc) but if anything like rendering of scenes and similar you will want to have a 8800 or 9800.
basicly if you can give us a bit more info it would be great, or just send me a pm and i'll help ya.
and oh yeah if you want a good feedback from people that would know all this go on game-artist.net and make an account and ask them because they will absolutely have a clue about what's right and what's wrong to buy.
Last edited by motherdear (2009-05-03 14:05:15)