New Computer Advice

[rmthompson]

Looking for advise on building the following PC.  Does anything look out of place to anyone?  Was thinking of going with NVIDIA Quadro K5000 instead.

Thank you in advance for your time.

LJ452AV -Configurable- HP Z820 Microsoft® Windows® Workstation Base

HP Z820 Workstation LJ452AV

Windows 7 Professional 64 QG517AV#ABA

HP Z820 850W 88% Efficient Chassis QG198AV

Intel® Xeon® E5-2637 v2 3.50Ghz 15MB 1866 4C 1st CPU (Only supported with 1125 W chassis) E2Q22AV

Intel® Xeon® E5-2637 v2 3.50Ghz 15MB 1866 4C 2nd CPU (Must be same speed as Processor 1.) E2Q71AV

HP Z820 Localization Kit LJ456AV#ABA

HP Dual Processor Air Cooling Kit (Supported with Dual Processors only. Not supported with Liquid Cooling solution.) A7E47AV

NVIDIA Quadro K4000 3GB DL-DVI(I)+DP+DP 1st No cables included Graphics C2J75AV

16GB DDR3-1866 (2x8GB) 2CPU Registered RAM (Supported only with Dual Processor.) E6R48AV

1TB 7200 RPM SATA 1st Hard Drive QJ687AV

16X SuperMulti DVDRW SATA Optical Drive QG250AV

HP Single Unit Packaging QG255AV

HP USB Keyboard A8Z58AV#ABA

HP USB Optical Mouse A8Z60AV

Intel Ethernet I210-T1 PCIe NIC E0T76AV

HP 14-in-1 Media Card Reader E4W38AV

[dgorsman]

Dual Xeon processors?  If Civil3D is the most intensive thing you are doing, you are flushing money away.

[odoshi]

I'd go with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Working too close to that thing could be a health hazard 😉

[neilyj666]

My set up works for me - I'd certainly consider going with an SSD and then upping the RAM.

[autoMick]

Here's some info about graphics cards:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-civil-3d-general/help-me-solve-the-quadro-versus-gtx-video-car...

[jmayo-EE]

I have a $10k machine with dual xeons, 64 gd of ram, dual quadro cards at work....it runs just a bit better than my 5 yr old $700 dual-core athalon with 8 gb of ram and an AMD 4GB video card using 2014...

As said before if C3D is the biggest tax on the machine and you are not working on massive data sets you can save a lot and have a great workstation with a core i7/i5, maximum ram and an SSD. The graphic cards IMO offer less performance benefit than the SSD and memory and I have 3d views open and rotating often.

IMO the dual xeon's won't help C3D in any significant way and data managment is the biggest thing impacting C3D performance.

[neilyj666]

Another factor that will impact the performance of Civil is whether your data is held on a network or locally

[rmthompson]

Thank you for all of the good advice.

We are subscription members and on Autodesk Infrastructure Design Suite Premium.

Yes C3D is currently the heavy hitter on my machine, but I have worked with other 3D Studio Max before and hope to use it again.  We are a muni with our entire system mapped, large ECW, parcel & customer info, & other data attached.  I try to querry them as often I can but lots of times I need the entire system for publishing.

I try to house as much of the data on my local machine as I can, unfortunately I have to share with others in the company so I have no choice to have some on the network.

I realize we have overbuilt this machines for toady but trying to look to the future...we get computer every 7 years, attempts to change that have gone no where.

I have upraded to a SSD drive with increased RAM shortly after I posted this thread.

Thansk again for all of your comments.

Ryan