All Purpose PC

Brian CivilEng

Hey all. I'm currently evaluating whether to buy a new desktop, my current one is a Dell from 2007 that I have maxed out every possible upgrade on. My other option is to just forget desktops completely and buy a laptop that will spend 99% of its life in a dock in the spare room. I was wondering if anyone could advise on what I could expect to get for the requirements below:

Budget: Circa €1000. Can go slightly higher is there would be too many compromises.
Main purpose: Some AutoCAD/Civil 3d, GIS software, Photoshop Elements, light gaming (Cities Skylines mostly), and general Microsoft Office.
Windows - will need a copy
Existing Parts - all new build. Only thing I can salvage from old computer is a Blu-Ray drive.
Monitor: Don't need a new one. Existing one is 24 inches, 1920x1080 res.
Peripherals: I can reuse keyboard, mouse and speakers. Will need an SD and Compact flash card reader.

Just pricing at the moment, will probably wait until things are a little more normal before purchasing to ensure my job still exists. I've never built a system from scratch before, but have upgraded RAM, CPU and hard drives on plenty of machines down through the years.

Thanks in advance for any advice, really appreciate it.

Brian CivilEng

Oh, and you may have guessed due to the fact I'm using a PC from 2007, I like to buy stuff that is future proofed and I can upgrade for years to come!

kaahooters

best advice right now is to wate and build after june when amd b550 budget boards are released.

Brian CivilEng

I've been doing some research, and I reckon I need to build a PC tailored towards AutoCad rather than trying for an all purpose computer. So any advice people can offer would be very much appreciated.

I'm thinking I need at least a i7 CPU, 16GB RAM and an Nvidia Quadro CPU (the P2000 is what my work laptop has so something similar to that).

Any advice on a good case, I want one that is solid, looks like a workstation so no LEDs and has drive bays for a blu-ray drive and card reader?

K.O.Kiki

I'll come back to this thread later/tomorrow, if needed.

barryribs

Brian CivilEng wrote: »

I've been doing some research, and I reckon I need to build a PC tailored towards AutoCad rather than trying for an all purpose computer. So any advice people can offer would be very much appreciated.

I'm thinking I need at least a i7 CPU, 16GB RAM and an Nvidia Quadro CPU (the P2000 is what my work laptop has so something similar to that).

Any advice on a good case, I want one that is solid, looks like a workstation so no LEDs and has drive bays for a blu-ray drive and card reader?

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/xVWjDx
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9 GHz 8-Core Processor (£299.99 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI X570-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard (£140.00 @ Currys PC World)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (£64.98 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Crucial BX500 480 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£55.44 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£54.78 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB MECH OC Video Card (£179.48 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Mid Tower Case (£50.47 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: Corsair TXM Gold 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply (£79.98 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £925.12
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-06-05 11:30 BST+0100

I'm not familiar with the Quadro cards, but they are very expensive vs the performance of a normal desktop graphics card but I suspect they will perform better for CAD programs?

My advice is spend as much as you can on the motherboard and build around that. AMD will give you more bang for your buck than an intel.

Brian CivilEng

barryribs wrote: »

I'm not familiar with the Quadro cards, but they are very expensive vs the performance of a normal desktop graphics card but I suspect they will perform better for CAD programs?

The CAD software tends to be designed around the Quadro cards, but that's not to say that other graphics cards won't run equally as good if not better. They are just an unknown. I've been using this site to identify cards and work from there: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/certified-graphics-hardware

smacl

Brian CivilEng wrote: »

The CAD software tends to be designed around the Quadro cards, but that's not to say that other graphics cards won't run equally as good if not better. They are just an unknown. I've been using this site to identify cards and work from there: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/certified-graphics-hardware

Most of what I've read recently suggests that you get better value and performance in the nVidia retail range, e.g. 2060, 2070 etc... over Quadro pro unless you're going for a very high end workstation. I'd tend to go nVidia over AMD on the off chance you use any bolt-ons to to C3D or AutoCAD that benefit from CUDA.

Brian CivilEng

That's me falling down the graphics card rabbit hole now. Forget all about my €1000 budget!

Cheers for all the help, think I'm going to start purchasing parts in the next few days. Just need to sleep on it first to see if the excitement wears off. I'll let you know how I get on.

smacl

Brian CivilEng wrote: »

That's me falling down the graphics card rabbit hole now. Forget all about my €1000 budget!

Cheers for all the help, think I'm going to start purchasing parts in the next few days. Just need to sleep on it first to see if the excitement wears off. I'll let you know how I get on.

I went for a GeForce 2060 which is a very capable card at a decent price. For AutoCAD and C3D this will be fine unless you're hitting models with a huge polygon count, which is more likely for Revit than CAD. The other areas that benefit from a decent GPU on the civils side is if you're rendering or dealing with large point cloud or UAV derived models. Looking at barryribs spec, I'd change the graphics card to the above and bring the memory to 32gb. This will add a couple of hundred quid to the price but will give your PC that will last you much longer. I'd also consider having a 1TB main SSD drive as you can go through space pretty quickly.

Zascar

barryribs wrote: »

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/xVWjDx
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9 GHz 8-Core Processor (£299.99 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI X570-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard (£140.00 @ Currys PC World)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (£64.98 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Crucial BX500 480 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£55.44 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£54.78 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB MECH OC Video Card (£179.48 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Mid Tower Case (£50.47 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: Corsair TXM Gold 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply (£79.98 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £925.12
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-06-05 11:30 BST+0100

I'm not familiar with the Quadro cards, but they are very expensive vs the performance of a normal desktop graphics card but I suspect they will perform better for CAD programs?

My advice is spend as much as you can on the motherboard and build around that. AMD will give you more bang for your buck than an intel.

This is a good list and very similar to a build I just did, but I went with 32gb ram as the Gskill is not much more.

I only went with a basic graphics card - I don't game all I do is Lightroom/photoshop - but you can always easily upgrade your graphics card at a later stage.

TheBoyConor

You don't need to buy a copy of windows.;)

barryribs

TheBoyConor wrote: »

You don't need to buy a copy of windows.;)

I'd rather spend the 20 euros for the license and not deal with the headache to be honest

Brian CivilEng

This is what I went with, although after purchasing the graphics card and power supply on Amazon I noticed they are out of stock and don't have delivery dates. Thursday 18th delivery date for everything else.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9 GHz 8-Core Processor (£308 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI X570-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard (£143.50 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL20 Memory (£147.59 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card:MSI NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 VENTUS XS 6G OC (£333.05 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Mid Tower Case (£50.47 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: Corsair TXM Gold 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply (£81.99 @ Amazon UK)

So I'm at stg£1064.6, or €1200 so far. Haven't gotten storage yet as I am considering going m.2 for the OS drive rather than SSD. I have a 125gb Crucial SSD that I could use in a pinch, but will probably purchase a new drive in the next few days. I have a 2 year old 4tb WD Blue 5400rpm hard drive in my old computer that I can transfer over which already contains all my movies, music and software.

All in all, not far off my budget, and a much higher specced machine than I expected. Thanks for everyone's help.

K.O.Kiki

Just know that M.2 is a form factor, not an indicator of speed.

So some drives are M.2 form factor but only SATA speed.
If it's faster than 600 MB/s then it's a "proper" NVMe drive.

Brian CivilEng

Delivery date of 23rd July for the graphics card, argh!

K.O.Kiki

Brian CivilEng wrote: »

Delivery date of 23rd July for the graphics card, argh!

Gigabyte Gaming OC for 340gbp

Or get an AMD RX 5600XT/RX 5700