A PC for CAD/Graphic design

[techallenged]

Hi all,

I have been asked to cost/build a PC which is going to be used for CAD and Graphic design.

Where should the money be spent? Should I put more into CPU at the expense of RAM? Graphics card against CPU? High Performance Ram versus twice as much value ram etc. XP Pro or XP Home. High speed HD versus space. AMD versus Intel.

Hope you see where I am coming from.

Thanks for any ideas.

Tech

BTW buying a Mac is probably not an option :D

[judge john]

well i can't say i have any experience with CAD but i will give you my 2 cents worth.
memory is important for CAD as the programs you use will be taking up plenty of memory. so 1.5GB to 2GB wouldn’t go a miss. i don't see why you will have to buy high performance memory as that’s mainly for gaming. so you can save your money and still get very good value memory form companies like Crucial, Kingston. also i can't see any specific reason why you would need XP pro over Home for what you want to do. a high speed HD is also probably not needed and a SATA(7800rpm) HD should be perfectly fine. high speed HD's just speed things up a little and aren’t worth the money unless you crave that extra bit of speed. CAD should take up quite a bit of HD room so you would be far better suited with a high capacity HD. a powerful CPU would certainly come in handy and i would be inclined to go for Intel as they tend to be much more competitive in none game benchmarks. but i don't know Huge amounts about AMD's so i will leave it for someone else to advise you there. also a dual core CPU would probably be very handy for CAD allowing you to work with several programs at a time far quicker.

[techallenged]

Thanks John,

Its kinda what I was expecting, although the hi performance Ram was something I wasn't to sure about, I expect a dual core is gonna be stretching the budget but if the ram issue is not so important the money saved there could fund the dual core. This is the type of thing I'm after, I dont want to cut corners, but dont want to overspend unnecessarily.

what about graphics card.. more memory the better?

thanks again

[judge john]

well i only really know about gfx cards for a gaming stand point. so i have no idea what CAD would require. in gaming more memory isn't always better and clock speeds, pipelines can play a far greater role. i would assume CAD maybe requires more gfx memory than gaming but i don't really know exactly. but most gfx cards have 256mb anyway and that should certainly be enough.

[SuperSparks]

Generally true CAD workstations don't use ordinary graphics cards, rather they use "professional" graphics cards. They aren't cheap.

http://www.matrox.com/mga/workstation/3dws/home.cfm

http://www.caddigest.com/subjects/reviews_hw/graphics_cards/graphiccards.htm

You also want a lot of RAM, I would suggest at least 2GB. If he's going to be using Autocad, then a dual-core CPU would be of benefit, as Autocad is already fully multithreaded and will make good use of dual-core.

[lgbpop]

Seeing the price of those cards prompts me to suggest you price the system high and tell the customer exactly why--quote the card's price if necessary, but no other component prices. Then you can sell them down if you have to, but make sure they know that what they want is pretty dear. Then again, they might not even blink if they're used to buying their computers ready-made.

[liam858]

Ditto, Dual Core CPU(AMD X2)|2gb RAM(Crucial/Kingston)|PNY Quadro FX graphics(3500/4000)| Do you also need to suggest a monitor?


Liam

[SpywareDr]

http://cgw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=ARTCL&ARTICLE_ID=244871&VERSION_NUM=2&p=18/

http://www.mcadonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=193&Itemid=73

[techallenged]

Phew!!!

Lots to take in here... cost in particular!!!

Thank you for all the info, I'm gonna get back to my mate and find out exactly what it is he is going to be doing with CAD and what software he is going to be running, this will have a bearing on the final decision.



http://www.mcadonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=193&Itemid=73 was particularly interesting read.

Thanks again

Tech