First build in nearly 5 years, help me with a spec

-Exodus-

-Exodus-

-Exodus-

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Ok so I haven't build a pc since early 2009, I've had laptops since but I want a desktop again.

I've still got an old lian li case so I won't need that, also got hard drives (corsair 128gb m400?) and 2tb drives so can upgrade that all later on. All I need is cpu, gpu, mobo, memory and psu.

Going to say my budget is £500 max!

It will mostly be for Solidworks (CAD software) and also Photoshop and Illustrator but I might be tempted to have a blast at some games on my old steam account.
 
Thanks. So ATX mobo then. Good Quadro/FirePro graphics cards for CAD software look to be outside of that budget, and you might be playing games too, so gaming card seems the way to go.


If you decide that a desktop class card is suitable for your needs, the GeForce GTX 660 does a very reasonable job, almost matching the more expensive GTX cards. For the best possible speeds, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 came out at the top of our 3D and overall benchmark results. The AMD Radeon cards unfortunately did not do as well as we hoped with only the AMD Radeon HD 7970 being able to outperform even the low-end NVIDIA GT 610. At the moment, NVIDIA cards are the clear winner from a performance standpoint.

For workstation class cards, the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 did very well, almost matching the speed of the Quadro 4000. It certainly is not as fast as the NVIDIA GTX cards, but when high precision is required, the Quadro 2000 is a great choice. Like the AMD Radeon cards, the FirePro cards did not fare very well in our benchmarks. The FirePro W9000 roughly equal to the Quadro 2000, yet is much more expensive.

So in conclusion, the NVIDIA GTX 660 is a great way to get close to the performance of the GTX 680, yet costs substantially less. If you are a professional that needs consistant, precise results, the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 is a great balance of performance and cost.

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-AutoCAD-2013-GPU-Acceleration-164/
Click to expand...

Bear in mind that article was written in October 10, 2012. The below would do the job but some members of the forum may be able to recommend something better. The processor is important for CAD, a good quad-core is very helpful. Budget didn't stretch to allow for an i5-4670K, so I've gone for an i5-4570, which is only 0.2 GHz slower and not overclockable. The newer GTX 700 series cards don't cooperate with the budget either, so the 660 mentioned in the article above has been included instead:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-4570 3.20GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £155.99
1 x EVGA GeForce GTX 660 FTW ACX 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (02G-P4-3063-KR) £149.99
1 x MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £79.99
1 x Patriot Viper "Sapphire Blue" 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (PV38G213C1KBL) £69.95
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 550W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £53.99
Total : £519.50 (includes shipping : £8.00).




Budget can be lowered by going for a different GTX 660 model, and a cheaper PSU.
 
 
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