Looking to build architecture rendering PC. Help!

[PorkPieCat]

I have a budget of £1500, but would prefer to stay below £1000, and will be using Revit, 3ds Max, Maxwell, Rhino, and Microstation.

Currently, I'm looking at cheap peripherals, something like a Dell Ultrasharp, and a Fractal R4 for a case... and that's it . I don't really know what components are most important for a rendering PC, so I'd be grateful for some suggestions for the budgeting of the rest of the components, and what kind of components I should be looking for.

So, things like how important the GPU is, whether I should go Nvidia or AMD, how much RAM, what speed, what kind of CPU, whether drive speed matters, and how I might use my budget to get the best balance of components.

Thanks

 

[PorkPieCat]

Cool, I'll expand from your recommendations. I think I'll try and get an AMD alternative actually, since I notice the Nvidia cards have horrendous OpenCL performance, and not even any good CUDA performance to make up for it. I think I read that Nvidia crippled performance in CUDA since these are consumer cards. Probably go for a 280X or something. Turns out my probgrams are mostly DirectX anyway.

Thanks for the help

 

[PorkPieCat]

Thanks fellas, I've done some more reading and based on project size I think I can go with 32GB.