Hardware - Faster processor or SSD

[AllenJessup]

What do you think is a better investment, going from a 2.3 Ghz processor to a 3.3 Ghz or getting a 256 GB SSD? I only have the budget for on or the other.

  vs.

[antoniovinci]

Allen, I think you got wrong prices from your dealer.

Here in Europe a brand new INTEL XEON E5-2643 costs 1500 euro, while a SSD 256 GB Sata III... 150 euro: you've read fine, 10 times more...

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

look to your harddrive, how much is it's LED on, the more it is on the more a SSD will bring speed.

If you have your files on a network, it's just the loading of application and access to temporary files the SSD will speed up.

Whatching the taskmanager and counting the times you are waiting for the workstation to be ready while the processor shows at least one kernel is on full load ==> that are the times you will get a speedup by higher cpu-performance.

So it depends on what and how you work.

Let me describe some situations, maybe you can then better evaluate your needs.

Situation 1:

In the morning you start AutoCAD/Civil3D, you load a project from the network and you are doing hard Civil-work, you do save (autosave), ==> your local drive has to start Civil3D, maybe some local config-files for assemblies are accessed and local temp-files (undo-file) has to be done on the local drive, while every _REGEN, layer freeze/thaw, layout switching, display-handling has to be done by CPU .... now more CPU-speed would be my choice.

Situation 2:

You have to use a lot of different drawings, they contain XRefs (cached on your local drive), you have also a lot of GIS-data with FDO, especially images (which are sometimes internally calulated as PNG, with pyramid-rebuilds, which are cached locally by default), every 10min you restart Civil3D (like I do while developing, or when just proofing drawings from others) .... then a SSD makes sense more than the fast processor.

Again, it's a question of how you work, ..... my 2c 😉

- alfred -

[AllenJessup]

Thanks for that analysis. While I sometimes have both cases, case 1 is much more common. All the project files and common support files are on a network. So I'll look more towards processor speed.

[AllenJessup]

Thanks. I'll check my numbers.

[ccookusi]

Depends on what your common tasks are.

But in most cases, SSD.