I’m often asked about hardware recommendations by friends and colleagues. I thought I’d collate my thoughts which you can find here
I’m often asked about hardware recommendations by friends and colleagues. I thought I’d collate my thoughts which you can find here
Hi Ryan,
Went through all this just after Christmas and bought a desktop.
Must have read every article on the Web and finally ended up with:-
Intel Core i7 4770k
Samsung 500Gb SSD
Hard Drive 1 TB
ASUS Optical Drive
Hewlett Packard 27″ Monitor.
32GB RAM
Wireless mouse, Keyboard and Windows 7 Professional and Office.
Paid $3300 in total for a custom build at local computer fixer. An equivalent package off the shelf was $3800. The off the shelf suppliers had extra 1 year guarantee but the local guy fixed on site.
I started out with the top spec then compromised mainly due to parts delivery here in the west, somethings are on a plane for singapore in 24 hrs, where others were a week from Sydney.
Enjoyed your article very much. Many of your comments I had already followed. Most articles are written by architectural render maniacs.
Regards
Brian
You have yourself an excellent system there Brian! Should last you a few good years. It’s great if you get the after sales support when you need it as well. I should mention that usually when I price up components I use the prices from companies such as Umart, MSY and PC Case Gear. All 3 of them offer Australia wide shipping and are usually pretty quick getting stuff out to you, but you wouldn’t get the face to face after sales support if you needed it.
The face to face service was the clincher for me as I am not motivated to computer repairs.
Regards
Brian
Hope you are well
Hi Brian,
What Graphics card did you use???
Keith Emery
Not sure what Brian used.
Personally I use an AMD R9 280X. The equivelent card from Nvidia would be the GTX 770.
I’ve just bought a new Cad workstation, I put the Quadro K4000 in it ???
But reading here maybe I shouldn’t have???
Keith
The K4000 is a very decent GPU. The reason why it is suggested to run with a gaming card rather than a workstation card (Quadro or Firepro) is because you want the GPU for a fluid user experience, Revit uses DirectX for displaying information on the screen and consumer based (gaming) GPUs are geared towards this. Not saying that workstation cards are not capable because they are, but gaming cards excel in regards to the user experience without costing as much as equivalent workstation cards; you would still be up for a higher end consumer card though.
Revit doesn’t use the GPU for rendering which is probably one of the bigger reasons to get a workstation graphics card. Revit only utilises the CPU for rendering. Quadro cards help out quite a lot with rendering in software such as Maya and Solidworks.
One of the issues with recommending a consumer GPU is that they are not officially supported by Autodesk when using Revit. You can check the approved GPU list for Revit 2014 here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?siteID=123112&id=18844534
You will see that all the approved hardware for Revit are workstation cards. If you have a support agreement with directly with Autodesk, your support agreement will require that you use hardware that is on the approved lists.
I could recommend some further reading for you if you’re interested. There is an article on Tom’s Hardware that you could have a look over that compares workstation cards against consumer cards:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-9.html
And there is also a lot of solid information on revitforum.org, the thread below specifically relates to graphics cards:
http://www.revitforum.org/hardware-infrastructure/72-revit-hardware-video-graphic-cards.html
From memory I am pretty sure I got the Quadro K2000, but I will try and double check.
I was advised that Quadro K2000,4000,5000 were most suitable for Navisworks. Therefore on the chance I would use Navisworks I got the cheapest of all 3 the K2000. No problems so far.