Continue to Site

Welcome to 3DCADForums

Join our CAD community forums where over 25,000 users interact to solve day to day problems and share ideas. We encourage you to visit, invite you to participate and look forward to your input and opinions. Acrobat 3D, AutoCAD, Catia, Inventor, IronCAD, Creo, Pro/ENGINEER, Solid Edge, SolidWorks, and others.

CAD Workstation Upgrade - Help needed

Speccybaldydave

New member
Hi All,

This is my first post on this forum and i'm hoping that some of you out there are more experienced than I am with suitable hardware choices for CAD workstations. I am in desperate need of an upgrade as I am using a vastly outdated machine with sub standard components.

I undertake CAD work as a side line to my main employment so I do need to be conservative with my cash, however I do want to make sure that I have a machine that is not going to crash/hang/struggle to display entities etc etc which is what I am currently dealing with. Consequently I don't really have a budget as such, but am hoping not to exceed £1k.

My main CAD package that I will use is Autocad MEP 2015. This will mostly be used to create 3D ventilation and plant layouts to high end residential homes, consisting of on average 3 to 4 floor levels, with a virtual model of the building and floor levels also. My current thoughts on what to purchase are as follows:

Processor - Intel Xeon E5-1620 V3 Quad Core 3.5GHz - £242.99
Heatsink - Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo - £29.99
RAM - Corsair Vengeance LPX 2133MHz (4x8GB) DDR4 2133 - £174.99
Graphics Card - AMD Firepro W4100 2Gb GDDR5 - £134.99
Motherboard - Asus X99-A (Intel X99) - £200.00
Power Supply - Corsair RM 650X - £82.99
Primary HDD - Solid State 120gb - Already Owned
Secondary Hard drives - 2x Sata 500gb WD Seagate - Already Owned

Ive looked at the minimum recommended system requirements on the AutoCAD website for MEP 2015 and tried to base this on that, but also to overspec a bit so it lasts a fair while. Any comments that you can offer as to where I can either save money or where I would perhaps need to invest more that whats specced would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance

Dave
 
Hello,

Your spec looks pretty solid. You have a robust Xeon processor and dedicated 3D graphics card in there - which are always my main starting points. I used to build my own machines but can't be bothered to worry about board and component compatibility or cooling any more. We just use Dells - where these issues have already been resolved and maybe add RAM as this is always cheaper from people like Crucial.

I generally say go for the highest spec processor you can afford, ideally the best graphics card as well - RAM and HDs are easy to add to later provided the case allows.

R.
 

Articles From 3DCAD World

Sponsor

Back
Top