£750 for a CAD/Graphics workstation -advice needed

[Savage_Smithy]

Hi, I have been granted a budget of around £750 for a new pc in work.
We work in television as set builders and so often need to provide clients with visuals of what we aim to achieve, with the computer I have at the moment i'm basically limited to sketchup visuals with a couple of lighting plugins due to time constraints with rendering. So main aim is an all round fast machine which can eventually be used for much higher quality graphics work.

Price includes just the tower minus the power supply, we have an ax1200 lay around doing nothing already. would like an ssd and a storage drive I dont intend to game on it so a high end graphics card isnt important (unless it is for some reason?)
any advice appreciated

Thanks,
Smithy

 

[ShivP]

Will you need an OS also?

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H-BK - Devil's Canyon Core i7 4790K CPU & Motherboard Bundle **£30 Saving + Gigabyte Free Upgrade + £30 Intel Cashback ** £372.98
1 x Avexir Core White Series 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-17200C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (AVD3U21331108G-2CIW) - White Light £129.95
1 x Crucial MX100 256GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter (CT256MX100SSD1) £79.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-Bit DVD - OEM (WN7-00614) £77.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD £41.99
1 x Raijintek Agos Midi Tower - Black £39.95
1 x Raijintek Themis Black Heatpipe CPU Cooler PWM - 120mm £19.99
Total : £772.44 (includes shipping : £8.00).




No OS;

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H-BK - Devil's Canyon Core i7 4790K CPU & Motherboard Bundle **£30 Saving + Gigabyte Free Upgrade + £30 Intel Cashback ** £372.98
1 x Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter CT512MX100SSD1) £154.99
1 x Avexir Core White Series 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-17200C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (AVD3U21331108G-2CIW) - White Light £129.95
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD £41.99
1 x Raijintek Agos Midi Tower - Black £39.95
1 x Raijintek Themis Black Heatpipe CPU Cooler PWM - 120mm £19.99
Total : £769.45 (includes shipping : £8.00).

 

[Doomedspeed]

What programs do you use?

Will you be setting up and rendering in 3DS MAX or something similar?

How 'high quality' are you're renders?

Depending on the answer to these questions, you may be better off going down the Xeon route. And grabbing a small GPU for CUDA support and rendering.

 

[spoffle]

What programs do you use?

Will you be setting up and rendering in 3DS MAX or something similar?

How 'high quality' are you're renders?

Depending on the answer to these questions, you may be better off going down the Xeon route. And grabbing a small GPU for CUDA support and rendering.

All this is unnecessary. You can achieve a hell of a lot with sketch up and the right plug ins or rendering engines.

You can achieve photo realistic results with sketchup and maxwell render, and the appeal is how quickly and easily it is to model in sketchup.

Sketchup is by far the best application for quick and detailed modelling because of how easy it is to actually draw things in a 3D environment.

You'll just need a fast CPU and a decent GPU with a decent amount of VRAM and 16GB+ system RAM as Maxwell render and the like can eat RAM up.

I've used a lot of programs for architectural visualisation, but I've always fell back on sketchup because it offers the fastest and smoothest work flow.

 

[Banzai_Joe]

You will struggle on a budget of £750 mate. I've just bought another Dell Xeon workstation for our cad monkeys at work, heavily discounted at £1054. Its the minumum our sketchup and cad users can get away with really.
Whilst sketchup will work on pretty much any gpu, when you want some accuracy in your renders the workstation CUDA card is really what you want.
We use the Quadro K2000 cards, but on here they are about £400 on their own.
You might get away with a quadro FX580/600 (i have about 5 of these spare going cheap if you're interested as an entry level card)
I agree with Doomedspeed the Xeons are a better cpu for this kind of work.
Large scratch disk as well.

 

[spoffle]

Readers with sketch up won't be inaccurate, especially for recording set renders. Over complicating this sort of thing tends to happen quite a bit, it really doesn't need to be that complex and expensive, and I'm speaking as a so called "CAD monkey".

 

[Banzai_Joe]

lol, you didn't take offence to my "cad monkey" bit did you?
I'm the I.T. Manager and do all the buying/configuring of our systems. I'm only really going on what our cad 'designers' have reported back when we used rigs that didn't have as good a setup as they do now. Our sketchup users do use a lot of imported object and heavily use Podium too. CPU and RAM certainly helps with that.
Actually the biggest issue our guys have are the damned openGL drivers bombing sketchup all the time. (that seems to be a prolific problem for a lot of sketchup users)
For the OP's reqs you may well be right, he may not need such beef in his rig.

 

[spoffle]

I didn't no, I just used it to stress the fact that I've worked as a CAD monkey, and I now do freelance graphics and CAD work, so I have hands on experience in what you can get away with when it comes to using Sketchup. I've used it on a variety of PCs, ranging from utter trash to a nice high end multi monitor workstation.

I've done a lot of the sort of stuff the OP will be doing, and I know for a fact that Xeons and pro graphics cards will just be large expenditures with no return compared to picking up consumer hardware.

It's all about using the right software to get the results you require, that's much more important than extreme accuracy and so on, especially if you consider the usage of unbiased rendering engines.