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system requirements C3D 2011

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Message 1 of 11
bberry
1210 Views, 10 Replies

system requirements C3D 2011

I'm looking for critiquing on the following hardware components on a machine that I'm purchasing to run Civ3D 2011.

I'm a little concerned with the graphics card since it's not specifically listed in the certified cards.  Any input would be greatly appreciated.  But keep in mind that this machine is meeting the benchmark price that we set for the purchase of a new machine.  Any more cost would have to be justifiable.  But I absolutely do not want to have difficulties running the program based on the machine.  🙂

 

thanks in advance!

Brandon

CAD manager / 100% production = no time for ample research

 

-------------------------------------

Processor:

 Studio 7100 Phenom II X6 1090T (3.2 GHz) (317-5245)

 

Processor:

 ATI Radeon HD 5450 1024MB (320-8970)

 

Processor:

 AMD Vision Ultimate Label (330-9207)

 

Memory:

 8GB DDR3 SDRAM,1333MHz, 4x2GB (317-9817)

 

Hard Drive:

 1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive 7200 RPM (342-9149)

 

 

 

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Message 2 of 11
tony1978
in reply to: bberry

Your computer will work just fine. I have the HP Elite with the phenom II also buts its only 3.0 ghz. I have 12 gb of ram and 1 gb nvida video card. i have not doubt that your computer will run smoothly.

 

tony

senior design tech

www.tonyscivil3dworld.blogspot.com

 

 

 Tony Carcamo


President/Owner


Civil CAD Learning Solutions


DFW BIM Infrastructure User Group


LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram | DFWBIUG |User Group




Message 3 of 11
michael.robertson
in reply to: bberry

The only spec that would concern me is the ATI Radeon HD card, we had a lot of problems with stability with it in C3D 2009, a little with 2010, it seems to work with 2011 during our training classes but we haven't done much production with it yet.

 

In 2009, a right click on a tool palette or when we were working on customizing the CUI would make C3D just disappear (like killing a process in Task Manager), it wasn't a graceful shutdown.

Mike Robertson
FL. Dept. of Transportation
CADD Applications Developer
Message 4 of 11
bberry
in reply to: michael.robertson

searching for a good cheap card is like finding a needle in a haystack.  I'm going crazy.

 

I do surfaces and rarely do renderings of the surface.  Aerial images on occasion.

 

Please...anyone with knowledge of a good card to work with the above hardware would be greatly appreciated.

Message 5 of 11
OMCUSNR
in reply to: bberry

What's the cost on this box?  The hard dive might be overkill on size.  I've found a 350 - 500 gig drive works well in med sized offices.  Also, does the graphics card support 2 monitors?

 

Side note for everyone:  My brother works in the hard drive industry making the machines that assemble and test drives (the heads specifically).  I asked him for his opinion on drives available right now and his comment was to stay away from Seagate at any cost and the velociraptors by Western Digital to be the most stable, and fastest available now.  His comment on Seagate is that they tend to forget they are a hard dive on a regular basis.

 

Also, with SSD's they tend not to get fully used and fade after time if the full capicity of the device is not accessed on a regular basis.

 

 

Homebuilt box: I5-2500k, MSI P67A-GD65, 12gig DDR3 1600 ram, ASUS ENGTX460 Video card, WD Velociraptor WD4500HLHX HD, Win 7 64 pro.
Message 6 of 11
OMCUSNR
in reply to: bberry

Brandon,

 

I've been looking for a new box meself recently, and couldn't find anything under $1500, so I went to Newegg and started to put together a box that I could assemble at home.  It's an I5-2500 Sandy Bridge based machine, with this:

 

EVGA GeForce GTS 450 1gig card with Nvidia drivers for $140 (after a $30 mail in rebate).

 

 

With me putting the parts together I was able to get box components w/ OS (Win7 64 pro) just at $1,000.

 

Reid

Homebuilt box: I5-2500k, MSI P67A-GD65, 12gig DDR3 1600 ram, ASUS ENGTX460 Video card, WD Velociraptor WD4500HLHX HD, Win 7 64 pro.
Message 7 of 11
Sinc
in reply to: OMCUSNR

 


@OMCUSNR wrote:

Also, with SSD's they tend not to get fully used and fade after time if the full capicity of the device is not accessed on a regular basis.

 

 


 

Can you elaborate on this?  I've never heard anything like this.

 

I know that each sector in an SSD has a write limit, and can only be written to a set number of times, and then that sector becomes unusable.  The latest generations of SSDs allow a lot of writes to each sector, however, so it takes a long time to hit that limit for each sector.  And some drives even have "spare" sectors, e.g., the drive may actually be able to hold 90GB of data, even though it is only an 80GB drive.  The extra sectors are held in reserve, so as sectors "die", they are replaced by a sector from the reserve.  This "write limit" is the primary reason SSDs are currently usually used only for the primary drive, and not for data drives (although the write limits are now getting really high, and it's starting to become less and less an issue).

 

What exactly does it mean to "access the full capacity of the drive on a regular basis"?

Sinc
Message 8 of 11
bberry
in reply to: OMCUSNR

EVGA GeForce GTS 450 isn't listed in the Autodesk certified cards.  What made you comfortable with this purchase?

Are you running civil 3d 2011? 

the specs look really good for the price!

Message 9 of 11
OMCUSNR
in reply to: bberry

Sinc,

 

That may have been what Scott was refering to, but I got the impression it was like a fileing cabinet drawer that has slots in it, and if all the slots wern't filled on a regular basis, the ones "in bacK" would fade from being accessible.  Sort of like the file drawer getting stuck half open.

 

bberry,

 

I was looking for two DVI outputs, it has one gig of video & uses Nvidia drivers.  I've had good experience using Nvidia stuff before.  I use C3d 2010 mostly now.  I have 2011 loaded on my laptop, which has an Nvidia card in it (not sure which one) and it seems to work fine.  It did have the flicker problem with SP1, but the reset hardware thing worked & no flicker now.

 

I don't do any rendering, but do hatch quite a bit.  I feel comfortable with the card.

 

Reid

Homebuilt box: I5-2500k, MSI P67A-GD65, 12gig DDR3 1600 ram, ASUS ENGTX460 Video card, WD Velociraptor WD4500HLHX HD, Win 7 64 pro.
Message 10 of 11
Sinc
in reply to: OMCUSNR

 


@OMCUSNR wrote:

 

That may have been what Scott was refering to, but I got the impression it was like a fileing cabinet drawer that has slots in it, and if all the slots wern't filled on a regular basis, the ones "in bacK" would fade from being accessible.  Sort of like the file drawer getting stuck half open.

 


 

I can't really make any sense out of that analogy, or figure out what it might mean to "access the full capacity of the drive on a regular basis".

 

Maybe you're referring to an old issue on the early SSD's, where used sectors would not be marked available for write until the drive was "trimmed"...?  Windows 7 would periodically send the command to trim the drive, but XP would not.  However, I believe self-trimming is now standard, and this is no longer an issue.

Sinc
Message 11 of 11
granite07
in reply to: Sinc

zombi thread... ALIVE!

 

hey, how did that build work out?

Forest Peterson, granite@stanford.edu; build-sheet

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