Budget/Entry system for Revit

[Steedward]

Evening all,

A friend of mine asked how much a 'new computer' would cost, with a view to using it for Revit, AutoCAD and photoshop for architectural design. I was wondering if you could have a look at my current spec list and indicate what kind of performance the machine will achieve, and any possible alternatives (which aren't insanely expensive).

Curret Proposed Spec:

Part	Price (inc V.A.T
PNY Quadro 600	£155.52
I5 2500k	£163.36
Asus P8Z77-V LX	£80.12
Corsair Memory Vengeance Blue 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz	£39.36
Corsair CXM Builder series 600W	£55.92
Seagate 1TB SATA	£54.95
Antec 900	£89.98
24x DVDRW from Liteon	£12.98
	£652.19

I'm coming at this from a gaming perspective, hence the i5 and Z77 board - would be interested to hear suggestions regarding the CPU. Is 8GB RAM is enough for a hungry Revit session?

Thanks for your input

P.S

Case is pretty much a place holder, might have a spare, so there's £100-ish to play with for altered main specs!

[pendean]

budget/entry = casual user.

Is this for a casual user of REVIT, Photoshop and AutoCAD? Or are you/they intending on making a living with it?

[Steedward]

Thanks for the reply! He is a "part 1 year out student. Will be going back to uni to do part 2, effectivly a masters". He current works for a small company, but I imagne will be working privately in time and hopes to get a good run out of this computer. I have updated the spec a bit as can be seen below:

	PNY Quadro 600	£155.52
or	1GB PNY NVIDIA Quadro 2000D	£383.04
	Intel Core i5 3570K	£176.58
or	Intel Core i7 3770	£227.00
	Asus P8Z77-V LX	£80.12
	Corsair Memory 8GB	£39.36
or	Corsair Memory 16GB	£69.79
	Corsair CXM Builder series 600W	£55.92
	Seagate 1TB SATA	£54.95
	Antec 900	£89.98
	24x DVDRW from Liteon	£12.98

From reading around, it seems the upgrade to Quadro 2000 would be worth it - though it is a big jump in cost. The GTX 660 sits in the middle of the costs and is a powerful (gaming) card, not sure how suitable it is for this kind of work though. Haven't looked into the Firepro much, after reading there are driver & stability issues( similar to their Radeon cards for gaming).

Also tempted to double the RAM, as it's cheap and a lot of people extol the virtures of 16gb.

My biggest question at the moment regards the CPU - I'm seeing a lot of work stations using the Xeon CPU (looking at the E3-1270, based on the specs of his computer at work). The E3-1270 is about £30 more than the i7 3770. Looking at the specs, they're almost identicle apart from the i7 having a slew of extra CPU features. Can AutoCAD & Revit use hyper threaded cores? I know they're almost useless for gaming, but have no real experience in the world of Autodesk products. Which is the stronger CPU for these applications?

All advice is much appriciated.

[pendean]

First year out of college would tell me they don't really need to cost upcharge of the i7. Especially if they are going back for their Part 2 next year (Architecture School in England I presume).

Video cards are important: there are recent posts around here for recommendations, explore them. I'm a FirePro Vid Card user and happy with the results, but don't take that as a blanket approval or a need to change.

16MB RAM is considered the professional ideal these days.

[dgorsman]

Xeons are more expensive than the Core i5/7's, so you will either be running a slower processor and paying the same, or running at equivalent speeds and paying more.  Theres several posts here on the differences, just plug "Xeon" in the search.

Generally the reason you see users running Xeon processors is large companies typically source from Dell or HP when they need large numbers of boxes, and their workstaion-class computers are built with Xeon processors.