CAD Build

fourtwozero

I'm looking to build an AutoCAD machine based on the following:

Programs like Autodesk Revit and sketch up modelling, solid works 2016 ,Photoshop and Autocad as well as illustrator.
The Autocad and sketch up would be run together most of the time, or YouTube/ and either of the above programs as I would be watching tutorial or training. Revit and modelling software would take big preference.

Id be looking to keep the costs down but still want reasonable performance.
Any help would be appreciated.

Digital Solitude

Is this college or professional work?

What's the budget, keeping costs down is fairly arbitrary given how much a good machine can run you.

Serephucus

Copy the first post from "How to ask for computer build help", and post it back here when you fill it out, then we can help you with a better idea of what you want.

shanec1928

cad machine and cheap definitely don't go hand in hand. You'll need ram and plenty of it and a half decent graphics card too.

fourtwozero

I wasn't fully clear when I posted - I build machines for a living but I have no knowledge of AutoCAD and the like:) So its more the choice of graphics card I should use or do I need faster then stock RAM speeds ie 1600mhz/2133mhz or 16gb vs 32gb or more. Having looked into it somewhat, I have seen on tomshardware, Autodesk works best with Nvidia based Cards and Solidworks works best with the AMD based cards? Im not sure if this is fact or just someones opinion. Will an Nvidia 970 do the job or am I best sticking to Quadro/ AMD FirePro based cards? I suppose one thousand euros is the starting point but it can be added to if its a big performance boost can be gained for couple of hundred extra euros. Its also going to have two monitors one for cad and one for general use.

Jo Satan

The spec would depend on what the user is working with in terms of the size of the drawings they are working on.

If they are a student learning Revit for coursework I would go for a decent i5/i7 laptop with an ssd, at least 8 gig of ram and as powerful a gtx card as they can afford. I would pair this with a widescreen monitor at least 23" for dual screen home use.
Revit tutorial dwgs are small in size and a student would probably benefit more from general use and portablility of a laptop.

If they prefer to have a desktop I would go for the equivalent of a strong gaming build as again they will get more use out of it, believe me they will not want to look at Revit at home once they start using it in a work environment for 40 plus hours a week. So a 970 would be fine (I use a 970 with Civil 3D sometimes and its adequate). Get a large widescreen monitor for CAD 1080p or 1440p as Revit needs a lot of screen real estate. Pair that with a decent sized monitor for youtube etc, although I would recommend getting tutorials in pdf format that come with sample drawings as you can learn at your own pace.

If it is for professional use then again it depends on the typical size of the drawings. Typical users would require an i5 / i7 with 16g of ram. Ram is an essential part of a CAD machine so the faster the better. Quaddro cards are optimized for CAD use, faster mathematical computations, less computational errors and drivers specifically for CAD products. A decent card in the 970 price bracket would be the K1200. An SSD is essential and should be large enough for the OS, programs and a couple of drawings.

It is very important that professional users get a machine that is up to the job as skimping on the machine is just wasting money in the long run, paying someone a wage to look at machine hang for hours per week because of an under-specced pc is dumb.

If the work is very demanding then you need to look at dual xeon work stations with m.2 ssd, quadro cards and stacks of high speed ram I know users who import huge amounts of 3d survey information into their drawings and they cannot get enough ram and processor speed. CAD products can use up to 16 cores for rendering. you would be looking at €2000 - €2500 for such a machine but this would still be very good value compared to pre-built equivalents from Dell, HP etc

K.O.Kiki

One of the upsides for prebuilt machines for professional work is they should come with proper hardware support.

Glebee

Would a machine thats capable of running CAD and revit need to be that powerfull. I have both of them on a work laptop which is a fairly poor machine and it runs them both fine for decent sized projects. Specs are Dell laptop Latitude E5440, i5-43000U CPU@1.90GHz, 4GB Ram, Intel HD Graphics family.
crap laptop but runs both decent.

Capt'n Midnight

system requirements for Autodesk® AutoCAD 2016. - treat as min spec, ignore the VM / server as you won't be using themm
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/System-requirements-for-AutoCAD-2016.html


This suggests that if you are going to throw money at the CUP you shouldn't spend extra for more cores, just go for one with the best value on single core performance. A todo would be to figure out how to set affinity of the application to the last real core of a CPU and everything else to the first, not sure if that would speed up things but worth trying IMHO. Not even sure if it's not worth turning Hyperthreading OFF when using AutoCAD ??
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Support-for-multi-core-processors-with-AutoCAD.html

Issue:
Your computer has a multi-core processor, and you have noticed that the acad.exe process does not use 100% of your available CPU resources. You want to know if AutoCAD supports multi-core processors.

Solution:
AutoCAD only supports multi-core technology in specific areas of the product, including:

2D regeneration
MentalRay rendering

To fully benefit from multi-core processors, you need to use multi-threaded software; AutoCAD is predominantly a single-threaded application.

Lots of RAM and SSD drives won't hurt , if doing big drawings.
Graphics card is important too. But like extra RAM and SSD could be added later to spread the cost.

At the end of the day AutoCAD ain't cheap unless you get a student edition and remember you have to keep upgrading the license too so you might as well splash some of the cash on the box.