Hi there everyone, I’m looking for some advice on hardware. I’ve not updated my hardware since the socket 775 and I’m returning to evening study in the new year to retrain as a cad technician in construction and so I want to sort a computer out so I can practice at home, so my question is what hardware would I need? Second hand or brand new? I will be using Autodesk AutoCAD, Revit and solidworks. I have a budget up to £1000, and I’ve not really got anything that I can salvage. Thanks for all the help.
Clock speed is more important than lots of threads The more RAM the better Nvidia Quadro (NOT NVS!) or AMD FirePro GPU
For £1000 you might be best served trying to pick up a second hand workstation. For under £1k you can pick up stuff like this. [this was just the first thing that came up on fleabay]
Hi there thank you for the replies. How can you tell if your ending up with good hardware if your buying second hand? What concerns me is that after say 6 months something breaks, also I would like to play some games, would something like that be fine? https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/TVs7cc Would this system not be any good? Keep the recommendations coming and thanks for the help.
Careful about buying a system with an expensive graphics card - my experience on Revvit and Autocad is that they use the CPU rather than GPU. Autodesk may tell you differently on their 'system requirements' so do some more research first.. Not sure about solidworks.
Using Solidworks is my day job, so that's why I mentioned "workstation-class" GPUs. Their official standpoint is that it will probably work with a gaming card, but there is no guarantee.
If it's anything like 3DS Max a Geforce will work, just in the rare event it doesn't work Autodesk will tell you to jog on... Autodesk seems to prefer nVidia to AMD on the GPU front. Likewise you can game on a Quadro, but it's not ideal. Basically you'd be best served keeping work and play seperate if you can.
I don't think you need to spend huge amounts of money on graphics cards. As has already been said, single threaded performance matters. If you're just using this for practice then you likely won't end up with huge assemblies. Perhaps try integrated graphics first and see if you have issues. Don't skimp on the screen - 24 inches over 23 inches is worth it. The viewport takes up maybe only 2/3s of the diagonal of the screen, so that extra inch makes a difference. For context, I've recently graduated from an engineering degree. The biggest project I worked on was a car with a team of 10 mechanical engineers working for two years in our spare time in Solidworks (although, admittedly this is not just pure CAD modeling but design work). The School's computers managed the CAD models just fine. They had 16GB RAM, and perhaps Haswell core i5s, integrated - graphics no graphics card. The most painful thing was the load time off the network drives. Integrated graphics on a i3 3217u did have struggle with assemblies, but it struggles with PDFs... WRT gaming graphics cards, I didn't have any issues with an AMD R7 360 on Solidworks.
Coming close to decade in design, and I've piloted Solidworks and Autocad for close to 15 years. If you're a multi-tasking sort with Chrome open in the background with plenty of tabs, maybe a spreadsheet or two, then RAM will be your biggest bottle neck. On a daily basis with just Chrome and Solidworks I am using between 10-12Gb. This peaks when importing .step files but essentially it settles down. So 16Gb to 32Gb would be my suggestion especially the later if you start looking at SW FEA analysis. A good quad or hex core CPU dating back to the days of X58 is still just as good as anything on today's market when it comes to these types of workloads. (SKT775 Quads are still excellent for autocad so I wouldn't be too quick to jump, and a SSD really makes them shine even when limited to SATA-II speeds.) GPU is a big "meh", in Solidworks it just makes the materials look nice but causes me eye strain so I keep that feature turned off. The viewports can be accelerated just fine with gaming grade hardware, and if you go autodesk then they natively support Geforce in AutoCad, not sure about Revit however the days of needing "Workstation class" graphics is over and has been for many years. Either way, I've pulled together what I might consider for myself if I were in your position. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (£166.99 @ Aria PC) CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£25.31 @ Ebuyer) Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350-GAMING 3 ATX AM4 Motherboard (£86.99 @ Amazon UK) Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (£143.99 @ Ebuyer) Storage: Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£127.95 @ Aria PC) Video Card: MSI - GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GAMING X 4G Video Card (£164.89 @ More Computers) Case: Corsair - 200R ATX Mid Tower Case (£49.99 @ Amazon UK) Power Supply: Corsair - CSM 650W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£65.47 @ Amazon UK) Total: £831.58 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-12-28 17:36 GMT+0000 If you hunt around on amazon you can pick up a OEM version of Win10 Pro for sensible prices, there was a time when CAD software would refuse to install on Home editions of windows.
