Afternoon Folks . I need to call on your good selvs for some help, I've been out of the PC loop for some time now (mac whore). I want to build myself a new work station I've got a basket full of goodies but I'm wondering if anyone could help scim som fat off & or alternatives as I pretty much just guessed what was going with what also need a recomendation for a Graphics card there are far too many to choose from. Work load will be CAD as just bought myself Autocad 2013 which is has brought my POS dell system to its knees. basket list as follows. Intel Core i5-3450S 2.80GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (65W) - Retail Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive Asus P8H77-I Intel H77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 MiniITX Motherboard Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM BitFenix Prodigy Mini-ITX Cube Case - Midnight Black Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 BeQuiet Pure Power L8 430W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply That lot is around £587 on overclockers & still need Graphics card, budget would be around £600-650 so need to skim som fat off to get a GFX card. Any help would be much appreciated. Morgan.
It's a tight budget for a workstation - IMO you really want a hyperthreaded quad core for things like CAD and also photo editing Are you wanting to play games too, or is that not important? If not, then you should consider getting a second hand graphics card from the forum - for only £50ish you can get something pretty nice.
No games just work stuff, no image editing this is for work , if I get it second hand its a bit dodgy reclaiming the VAT on it. Hyperthreaded CPU what model would that be i7? I could skimp out the £70 for the 1TB hdd as I think 128GB SSD would be more then enough space only using 50GB at the moment and have a NAS box for backup if it goes tits up.
You could skip the SSD for a month or so and put the money into a 2nd hand i7 2600K. An SSD is really very nice, but not essential for a workstation. The budget is really pretty slim, but a GTX 550ti will do you for graphics(about £80) if you can't do 2nd hand.
Except for mental ray, Autocad is monothreaded. He won't take any benefits from an i7. I'd highly suggest a firepro (V5900 or V7900) if it is for professionnal use. EDIT : Didn't see the budget ... firepro and quadro are out of range
Budget is a bit tight it got swalled up by software lol Its not something I'm doing day in and day out & am still learning how to it works will look at swapping out some parts. Am I thinking right if i say that autocad is graphics heavy so I could get a slighly less powerfull CPU but a more powerfull GFX card? Current machine is a Dell Vostro 230 , C2Duo 2.9ghz, 3GB ram, onboard graphics.
Hmm, with the news that AutoCAd is mostly single thread... Maybe use a highly clocked i3 (you can always leave it to render overnight) with 16GB ram and a 1GB 550ti or 2GB 560ti?
I did look at the i3 roughly £100 so that would save £50 on the cpu to add onto an extra 8GB of ram might just get a 2nd hand GFX card and just skip claiming on it. Thank you for all the help guys much appreciated, since i last bought a PC there is way more choice on the market.
the recommended spec for autocad 2013 is quite low. Pentium 4, 4GB ram, display 1600 x 1050 true colour graphic cards the problem recommend cards link below http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servle..._group=3&release=2013&os=8192&manuf=all&opt=0
Another thing, Autocad (like all CAD software) uses openGl for its viewport. Nvidia has capped opengl perf on all geforces newer than the GTX2xx series (to increase quadro sales). Regarding your budget, I'd go with a radeon (better OGL perf than geforce) or a firepro card if the budget allows it (like the firepro V3900 or V4900). AMD's entry level professionnal card are far better than their Nvidia equivalent.
-1 on the Quadro 400 or even 600, both are outperformed by FX4600/FX4800 which (former) can be had for less cash second hand. FX 4600's for about £75-100 and FX 4800 for £150-250. They may be considerably older tech (G80 and D10U-20) but they where one step from top in their era, rather than the bottom of today's.
