3D CAD build

sgoaty

sgoaty

sgoaty

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A friend of mine has a small engineering company and is looking to upgrade his 3D cad system. All I know about his existing system is it's a quad core i7 so it must be getting on a bit.

I have no idea how to spec a 3D CAD system I don't even know what questions to ask him. He's helped me out a lot in the past so I'd like to sort out and build a system for him.
Can anyone help?
Thanks
Scott
 
Do you know what 3D CAD software he is using?

I have no idea about 3D CAD stuff but the software used might give a good starting point to building a system
 
If he is currently using a quadcore i7 then an upgrade to 13th gen intel will be huge. I will list parts and not make a basket because a lot of the most cost effective parts are not available on OCUK

i7 13700 - the standard 13700 , not the K not the F not the KF just the bog standard no letter that has the igp.
B760 DDR5 mobo - Not available on OCUK yet , no idea why. You could go with B660 but you would have to get a version with bios flashback so best to just shop around for B760.
DDR5 - 2x32gb 6000mhz. Will be expensive but fast ram and lots of it is great for cad work.
GPU - You should find out if the software he uses has hardware acceleration. 3060 12gb will be the best card in 90% of cases but he may not be using a gpu at all which is why I recommended the cpu I did with the igp. Find out what is in his current pc. If he currently has a quadro card then he will most likely need a new version or reuse his current card, no real idea what the Ampere or Lovelace quadro options are. If he does need a new quadro card it will be very expensive.

Storage . psu , case etc is all easy to pick up and for work does not need to be blingy so sure you can sort that out for him. Will need a decent cooler for the i7 , Thermaltake Peerless Assasin is best value tower cooler at moment or a 240 aio will do the job as well. Will need to pick a case with cooling in mind.

Find out what is in his current system and get a budget as well.
 
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I use of most of the Autodesk suite with regards to Cad and since 2018, ive just been using upto date gaming laptops. The main thing is you ideally always want 32GB of ram... I know you don't need it but in real-world use, it helps immensely especially when CAD files get toward the 100 MB mark.

As long as you upgrade to something multicore that's up to date (2021/22) probably can't go wrong.

Although ive always found team green GPU's to be best for cad and construction/survey-related renderings as the companies producing the software seem to just prefer Cuda cores since 2017. In some instances, AMD support has been dropped of newer updates.
 
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sgoaty said:
He uses Autodesk Inventor
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I use dailyon my PC in my signature. It worked really well with a 3060 Ti before I upgraded too.

I appreciate the hardware in my PC is a couple of years old now, but it should hopefully give you an idea of what level you're looking at.

Gone are the days of needing a workstation GPU, as they are so overpriced even when compared with the 4000 series Nvidia cards.

Recommended system for inventor 2023 according to Autodesk:
RAM - 32GB
GPU - 4 GB with 106 GB/S Bandwidth and DirectX 11 compliant
CPU - 3.0 GHz or greater, 4 or more cores

On the point of the CPU - if your friend will be rendering the 3D models go for a higher amount of cores. At 8 cores mine is too slow at rendering for my liking. Although I don't do a lot of it I am still considering an upgrade to 5900X/5950X.

I would also go for a really fast NVMe drive. There is a lot of data transfer involved, especially when using a data management system such as Vault.

If you're going as far as monitor I'd advise staying away from curved. Stick to flat.
 
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