Cad/rendering build help

Snookums · 23 Dec 2015 at 11:58

The girlfriend wants a decent PC for cad/rendering, I have quite a few bits laying around that can get her started just want to know how it'll hold up.

I've got:

Athlon x4 750k & board
8gb DDR3 1333Mhz
1tb HDD
60gb SSD use it as an OS boot

Just want to know how a 750k will do?

I'm looking at getting an mATX case and a FirePro/quadro but know nothing about them. Any help?

Also what would you recommend for PSU for a build like this?

Decent mATX case? Was thinking a Styx?

And a cooler, I've lost the stock cooler for my 750k

Budget is up to £200 for the left over bits the cheaper the better cause that mean I can upgrade her to an 8350 sooner rather than later

lsg1r · 23 Dec 2015 at 13:03

Will the 750k be ok... yeah it will work although obviously it won't be 'that' fast, it's likely around a 1/3 of the speed of your i7 based on benchmarks.

Don't bother with a quadro/firepro, with £200 budget it just isn't worth it. I'd personally get a decent nvidia geforce (in my view better than ati for most 3D software).

I'd also suggest more ram, 8GB is literally the bare minimum these days, you'd likely see more gain there than getting a quadro/firegl. So you could buy say 2x4GB ram (£30-40), a decent air cooler is around £20-30, then it's just the case and the gpu to consider, you could get around the 750 to 750ti range (or higher if second hand).

As to the case, personally I go for airflow over looks, rendering can make the pc pretty hot.

Also not sure if 60GB will be enough space for all the software to get installed on, the software I use is gradually getting bigger and bigger.

Edit (which appears to be broken). Having said that we don't know much about the software in use so if you want to give some more info that would be great

Snookums · 23 Dec 2015 at 13:24

Are the entry level cards no good then? It'll do for a stop gap now. Yeah I was thinking another 8gb of ram.

The ssd is literally just for the OS I just have it laying around.

Still need to find a decent PSU.

lsg1r · 23 Dec 2015 at 13:43

In the most general terms a quadro (and firegl against radeon) are basically a geforce with ecc ram and support for 10bit colour fully enabled (not really needed in cad if I'm honest) along with 'customer support' and validation that it will work in software (I've had no issues using geforce).

As you haven't said about software I'll use 3DS Max as an example, it now uses directx to drive the graphics which means there is no real gain like in the olden days where it used to use open gl from using a quadro.

Then there's cuda for things like iray (no support for opencl, just cuda) and vray (works with both cuda/opencl) that use the gpu to render and they're very linear in that they scale according to the number of 'processing cores' and core clock speed (on the same architecture).

A perfect example is the titan x is basically an m6000 and is fractionally faster overall due to clock speeds but costs 1/4 of the price due to lacking the support and ecc ram.

The current quadro k420 is severely lacking, it would be like sticking a geforce 720 (pretty sure it's based off this) in a gaming rig. Unless you're a big business with custom software etc the odds of you needing the support offered from a quadro is slim so like I say you could look at a gpu around the 750 to 750ti range (more gpu memory/cuda cores the better)

Snookums · 23 Dec 2015 at 14:50

Okay then I'll get her the best Nvidia I can find for the price.

DaleTheWhale · 23 Dec 2015 at 14:59

More RAM would be ideal as well.

Borealis · 23 Dec 2015 at 19:39

What CAD system is she going to be using?

For example, during my student days I was running SolidWorks on an Athlon II x4 640 and a 512MB GF9800GT! The 750k should be fine.

lsg's right. More RAM would be a very good idea - 16GB should be fine. Even when I'm CAD rendering at work, I don't need 32GB.

The Quadros/FirePros are expensive for what they are. Unless you're running and regularly using software that makes good use of them, they're not worth the investment. You'd be better off with a decent mainstream card like a 750Ti, which would free up more cash for RAM. As lsg says, one of the main things with workstation cards is that they're validated by CAD software companies. At work we use SolidWorks and all our workstations have a solidworks-certified quadro inside, despite the fact the 2016 will be the first release to support GPU rendering! Prior to 2016, all rendering was performed by the CPU and the quadro just provided fancy on-screen graphics.