What is the industry average for a CAD machine?

[Anonymous]

Any and all information is greatly appreciated.

I'm curious as to how our companies CAD machines match up to other firms
with similar size. I work for an architectural firm that has about 30 full
time CAD operators, and around 300 employees. I'd say that our average
computer for a CAD operator is a PIII 450 (with windows NT), 16MB video card
(Matrox), and 128MB ram with a 17" monitor.

How do these hardware listings match up with everyone else?
Better or lower than average?

Remember, any information is helpfulm, thanks everyone!

[Anonymous]

That's at the low end of what we have but probably a fairly common configuration
out there. New machines should be at least double all the specs you mention.
Hard to say when a machine becomes obsolete though, it has more to do with file
sizes & what type of work you are doing. If you get a couple new machines &
start creating monster files with cool effects then you can legitimately say
that you need to upgrade everyone's machines to keep up.

c wrote:

> Any and all information is greatly appreciated.
>
> I'm curious as to how our companies CAD machines match up to other firms
> with similar size. I work for an architectural firm that has about 30 full
> time CAD operators, and around 300 employees. I'd say that our average
> computer for a CAD operator is a PIII 450 (with windows NT), 16MB video card
> (Matrox), and 128MB ram with a 17" monitor.
>
> How do these hardware listings match up with everyone else?
> Better or lower than average?
>
> Remember, any information is helpfulm, thanks everyone!

[Anonymous]

That's basically the machines we're currently on. Hoping to move to a new office soon and upgrade to 1 ghz machines with
384 mb and elsa cards plus 19" monitors.

CJ

"c" wrote in message news:361DF76C5441769AB213AA4FBDB5BC0D@in.WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
> Any and all information is greatly appreciated.
>
> I'm curious as to how our companies CAD machines match up to other firms
> with similar size. I work for an architectural firm that has about 30 full
> time CAD operators, and around 300 employees. I'd say that our average
> computer for a CAD operator is a PIII 450 (with windows NT), 16MB video card
> (Matrox), and 128MB ram with a 17" monitor.
>
> How do these hardware listings match up with everyone else?
> Better or lower than average?
>
> Remember, any information is helpfulm, thanks everyone!
>

[Anonymous]

monitor size is small. just about every office I'v seen is at least 19" up
to 24" and many dual mon's showing up.
windows xp will be coming out shortly so you might want to see what hardware
it likes best (always something new around the corner). Matrox cards are
still the best at 2d and nvida at 3d (within reasonable pricing) . our last
machine was a 1.3 ghz p4 with pc600 ram. If you are not going with p4 then
stick with pc133 ram otherwise you wasting money.

Investment focus should be on the monitor for cad. A good monitor will last
through a couple computer upgrades and you have the most interaction with
it.

we still have one cad station running ac2k on a 200mhz ppro. but it has a
21" monitor and a 32mb video card.

_J_

[Anonymous]

That's probably on the lowest end of the scale, given that the average age of a
company's PCs is approx. about a year and a half.

But comparing the speed of your current fleet against an "industry average" is
probably a pointless exercise. It says nothing about what software requirements
you have, OS choice, networking infrastructure, etc.

Let's just say those specs are completely unacceptable today, and leave it at
that. 🙂

Matt
mstachoni@home.com
mstachoni@beyerdesign.com

On Thu, 8 Feb 2001 15:46:11 -0800, "c" wrote:

>Any and all information is greatly appreciated.
>
>I'm curious as to how our companies CAD machines match up to other firms
>with similar size. I work for an architectural firm that has about 30 full
>time CAD operators, and around 300 employees. I'd say that our average
>computer for a CAD operator is a PIII 450 (with windows NT), 16MB video card
>(Matrox), and 128MB ram with a 17" monitor.
>
>How do these hardware listings match up with everyone else?
>Better or lower than average?
>
>Remember, any information is helpfulm, thanks everyone!