Help needed with a new CAD/ ENGINEERING setup

[jet1990]

Hi all I'm new to this forum

I'm currently employed as a design engineer a well as owning my own design business, I specialise in graphic design and 3D modelling. Long story short I need a new set up at home as up until now I've used an ancient laptop with a second screen.

My works PC is a dell T1600 with an nvidia quadro 2000 and km really happy with the performance of the system overall.

Can anyone recommend me prebuilt setup or suggest which parts to use. I wish the specs to be:

A ssd for my operating software to run off.
At least 1tb of storage on second hard drive
A graphics card that can handle 3d modelling AMD rendering
Screens aren't an issue they've already been purchased.
Windows 7
Minimum of 16gb of ram will do I think?
Processor and motherboard? Not too sure
Fan and power supply? Again not too sure.

My budget is around £1000 as I intend this system to last me a long time with the capabilities of upgrading in the future.

Thanks in advance

 

[mightymouse]

Hello and welcome

If you really need something for CAD/Engineering then you may need to look for a nVIDIA Quadro or AMD FirePro video card but they dont come cheap.

Ram should be as high as possible for 3D modelling and minimum i7 processor.

SSD that you should go for is 512GB for speed

 

[ShivP]

After a quick look Quadro 2000's can be picked up for circa £400, which you may be able to squeeze everything else in, but unlikely for under £1000, maybe looking at £1.2-£1.3k

 

[jet1990]

Cheers guys. Any suggestions on specific parts as im a noob when it comes to picking the right part.

 

[jet1990]

Bump.....

Im looking to purchase the parts ASAP. I can stretch my budget to around 1200-1300 but i need 100 set aside of my second monitor!

 

[jet1990]

It may be worth noting that most of my 3D modelling takes place on my work computer, this home computer will be used mostly for graphic design as well as some small scale modelling and rendering. I plan on picking up adobe after effects and Zbrush in the near future so i don't know if that should effect the graphics card i need to buy.

 

[Doomedspeed]

Hi,

Im sorry I didn't see this earlier. I hope im not too late with my input.

I am a CAD designer (work wise) and Built a PC for these purposes while I was at uni (3 odd years ago).

£1000-£1300 is a good budget. Im sure we can spec you up something good.

GPU wise your uses seem quite GPU light, Rendering is a GPU killer (in a good way) so if you're only doing a few small renders a simple solid GPU will be fine. I may suggest a GTX 750ti. Very low power usage cut with CUDA support and enough cores to run a decent display.

This could be very similar to a gaming build too (with a toned down GPU).

Im not sure whether you can ueasily use GPU acceleration with AE or not, if not a big GPU may be a little redundant.

The Quadro 2000 is a great Professional GPU though.

An idea of a Professional Build would be:

YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD FirePro V5900 Professional Graphics Card - 2GB - GDDR5 SDRAM £369.95
1 x Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 2.10GHz 6-Core with Hyperthreading & Turbo (Socket 2011) - Retail £319.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Beast 16GB (4x4GB) PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Quad Channel Kit (KHX24C11T3K4/16X) £139.99
1 x MSI X79A-GD45 Plus (8D) Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £139.99
1 x Crucial MX100 256GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter (CT256MX100SSD1) £79.99
1 x Antec P100 Mid Tower Silenced Computing Case £59.99
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 450W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £49.99
1 x Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU Cooler £26.99
1 x LG GH24NSB0 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £1,210.48 (includes shipping : £8.00).



As the programs you use are mostly CPU bounded and thread 'friendly' a Xeon is a pretty good choice.

The V5900 is basically an AMD Quadro 2000.

 

[jet1990]

Ahhhh I went out and bought the system 2 nights ago! I wish i would have waited a day lol

I bought:
1x Intel Core i7-3770 3.4GHz Socket 1155 Quad Core (off the top of my head im 80% this is the right i7 i bought)
1x GTX 760 Jetstream 4GB GPU
1x Gigabyte Z87-HD3 Intel Socket 1150 Motherboard
1x Kingston HyperX Beast 16GB (2x 8gb) DDR3 2400MHz
1x Corsair CS750M 750W Power Supply
1x Crucial MX100 2.5" 512GB SATA III SSD
1x Seagate 7200.14 2TB SATA III 3.5" Hard Drive
1x Corsair Carbide SPEC-03 Gaming Black Midi Tower
1x DVD RW drive


Im not sure how good this build is but it was my first ever pc build and it went quite well although the network adapter isn't being recognised by any ports on the motherboard ( tried to return it and they tested it on theirs and it was working fine so im a little confused at the moment lol )

Thanks for your input, I will be upgrading certain components in the future.

 

[Doomedspeed]

Yeah, I thought I was too late, so im sorry for tempting you.

That looks pretty good actually, that's more 'gaming rig' style which I mentioned as being a good option.

I hope the CPU was a 4770 as the 3770 is a different socket to Z87.

You have done pretty well to be fair.

 

[jet1990]

I have just double checked and it was a 4770 (PHEW!) i got all the parts including a wireless keyboard, mouse and network card for just under £1050.

 

[FreeStream]

I don't know why people keep speccing Xeons and 6 core chips for this.

I've not come across a single CAD package that, during CAD tasks, actually utilises more than one core.

If I was building my own rig it would be a 4790K, overclocked a tad with a decent cooler to keep noise down and turbo speeds up, 32GB RAM, SSD, then the best Quadro/Firepro card that I can afford/is supported by the software.

 

[ZXSpectrum]

I don't know why people keep speccing Xeons and 6 core chips for this.

I've not come across a single CAD package that, during CAD tasks, actually utilises more than one core.

If I was building my own rig it would be a 4790K, overclocked a tad with a decent cooler to keep noise down and turbo speeds up, 32GB RAM, SSD, then the best Quadro/Firepro card that I can afford/is supported by the software.

I have seen several but they tend to be the ones that utilise the CPU for doing realtime visual rendering on the fly.

I agree.. I build these systems for a living and I wouldn't spec a single xeon such as the E5-2620v2 as the main cpu. You would be a lot better off getting a E5-1620v2 if you need 4 cores or E5-1650v2 if you need 6 cores(or 1680v2 for 8 cored ). Just by sticking a xeon in there doesn't make it a workstation especially such a poor performing (Relative to price) you would actually be better going for an i7-4790 or the E5-16xxv2 if you require ISV certification. I also know people do use GTX but again there will be no ISV certification with consumer graphics cards used with packages such as Catia/Solidworks/etc which may lead you into issues in the future.

 

[spoffle]

I don't know why people keep speccing Xeons and 6 core chips for this.

I've not come across a single CAD package that, during CAD tasks, actually utilises more than one core.

If I was building my own rig it would be a 4790K, overclocked a tad with a decent cooler to keep noise down and turbo speeds up, 32GB RAM, SSD, then the best Quadro/Firepro card that I can afford/is supported by the software.

I have seen several but they tend to be the ones that utilise the CPU for doing realtime visual rendering on the fly.

I agree.. I build these systems for a living and I wouldn't spec a single xeon such as the E5-2620v2 as the main cpu. You would be a lot better off getting a E5-1620v2 if you need 4 cores or E5-1650v2 if you need 6 cores(or 1680v2 for 8 cored ). Just by sticking a xeon in there doesn't make it a workstation especially such a poor performing (Relative to price) you would actually be better going for an i7-4790 or the E5-16xxv2 if you require ISV certification. I also know people do use GTX but again there will be no ISV certification with consumer graphics cards used with packages such as Catia/Solidworks/etc which may lead you into issues in the future.

Rendering uses all CPU cores...

 

[ZXSpectrum]

Rendering uses all CPU cores...

I understand that, we actually develop a specific product just for that purpose, What I was trying to say was that a E5-2620v2 is a terrible all round cpu for a workstation. Mainly because its 6x2.2Ghz cores so not only your rendering performance on be lower than a 4 Core E5-1620v2 (13.2Ghz vs 14.8Ghz) for the same price it would also reduce 3D modelling performance as well. And on top of this if you do use a piece of software that does only use 1 core then its performance will be drastically reduced as the stock speed is 2.2Ghz on the 2620v2 vs the 3.7ghz on the 1650v2.

 

[spoffle]

Of course, it just seemed that you were in agreement with Concorde Rules who doesn't seem to know what he's talking about, as it's typical for CAD applications to use all cores when rendering (hence the reason I have a 3930K). He shouldn't really be giving people advice with how wrong he got it there.

 

[ZXSpectrum]

Ah.. ..

 

[spoffle]

Yeah, no chance I was disagreeing with the notion that 6 core 2Ghz CPUs being used for workstations was a poor choice

 

[FreeStream]

Of course, it just seemed that you were in agreement with Concorde Rules who doesn't seem to know what he's talking about, as it's typical for CAD applications to use all cores when rendering (hence the reason I have a 3930K). He shouldn't really be giving people advice with how wrong he got it there.

I use CATIA all day, everyday. I also use Autodesk packages, neither of these during CAD modelling tasks use more than one core.

Rendering tasks, are multi-thread, CAD modelling, loading large products, are not. I should have clarified "CAD" as modelling, not rendering scenes.