If I recall correctly Nvidia gave away GTX480's. You could probably use it, the things got some beef to it (I run decently on my home computers GTX460 and my laptops GTX555m), it's just if you are purchasing something, get a workstation card. But, if it's free, take whatever you can get
Also:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=91132550276
Apply to this, and you can get several copies of SolidWorks for free. I spent about 10-15 minutes on this survey, and we got 20 team copies of SolidWorks within 2 weeks.