New Inventor 2012 Workstation Specs

[Anonymous]

I came across this articale (see below) in the Civil 3D Forums and was wondering if this was the concept for Inventor. My company is the market for new comps and I'm incharger of building and ordering but I'm not sure on what processors to go with (Xenon or i processors?) and video cards since everythign is open GLi now (Quadro / Firepro or Gaming Card).

Ive serached lots of forums but having came across something like this. Our boss wants to stick with Dell which I disagree. Please any information will prove helpful.

We've put together a paper 
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autocad_civil_3d_technical_note_harnessingpowerofcivil3d.pdf 
that talks about the different operating systems and how to get the most out 
of your machine today. The paper doesn't talk about Windows 7 (it was 
written before the offical launch) but Windows 7 has advantages of the Vista 
memory management and an additional 4 years of development.

Here is my ranked list of what is important in shopping for a computer:
1. Windows 7 64 – any other operating system is a downgrade.
2. RAM – the more the better, but I wouldn’t pay a premium for it. The 
reason I say that is that with 64 bit operating systems if you run out of 
physical ram, the OS will start using the hard disk as virtual RAM so while 
8 may give you better performance than 4 you may not need it right away.
3. Hard Disk – Get a fast one (especially if you think you’ll be using it 
for virtual RAM swap space). Point cloud files are also disk based so you 
want a fast drive to process those.
4. CPU – I would go with a really fast duo core. If you work mostly in Civil 
3D then having more than 2 cores won’t help that much especially if you pay 
for the additional cores with reduced speed in each one. We’ve look at 
splitting Civil 3D across multiple cores and found that it really doesn’t 
help (in some cases it is slower) because of the nature of the calculations 
that we do and the nature of the problem we are trying to solve.
5. Graphics Card – unless you do a lot of rendering in Max, the graphics 
card is really not where you need to invest. Any good certified card should 
be good enough. If you’ve maxed out 1-4 and still have budget then go for a 
great video card.

For an existing computer (purchased in the last few years) the best upgrade 
would be to Windows 7 64. This $200 upgrade would extend the life of the 
machine.

[blair]

Inventor likes fast graphics cards, good/fast "gamming" cards. Rendering in Studio uses multi-cores, IDW (drawing enviroment) now in IV2012 can make use of multi-cores for placing (creating drawing views).

[sam_m]

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@Anonymous wrote:

since everythign is open GLi now (Quadro / Firepro or Gaming Card).

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where have you got that from?  Since Inventor 11 (not 2011 but 11, released in 2006) it's been DirectX and thus NOT OpenGL.  As such there's no need for certified cards or drivers.

LOADS of topics on here about hardware suggestions so I'd suggest looking at those for inspiration.  Graphics card - bang/buck I'd probably look at a GeForce GTX 560 (or above) if I was to build a pc tomorrow.

isn't Civil 3D a version of AutoCAD anyway?  If you're using Inventor then why even refer to Civil 3D documentation?