CPU and GPU Recommendations for Plant 3D

[Anonymous]

Hi all, 

I will go straight to the point. I'm intending to buy a mobile workstations that will be used primarily for AutoCAD Plant 3D. But the hardware recommendations from AutoDesk...... isn't very specific. And I am not well-versed with mobile workstation hardware specs. 

I need help choosing between 2 mobile workstations I found of similar price. The difference between the 2 are the CPU and GPU as follows:

i7-8750H (6 Core, 9 MB Cache, 2.20 GHz, 4.1 GHz Turbo)
Nvidia Quadro P600 w/ 4GB GDDR5 
512 GB SSD

OR

i7-6700HQ (4 Core, 6MB Cache, 2.6 GHz, 3.5 GHz Turbo)
Nvidia Quadro M1000M w/ 4GB GDDR5
256 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD

Both models come with at least 16GB of RAM.

The recommended hardware for the "processor" mentions to look for a high CPU-rate for each kernel. Does this mean the number of cores has little impact and instead I should focus on the clock speed? And if the clock speed plays the biggest role, should I refer to the base frequency or the turbo ?

As for the GPU, my only concern is that AutoDesk recommends DirectX 11 compliant GPU. However, the Quadro P600 is Direct 12.0. Is DirectX 12 backward compatible and I should be able to install and run AutoCAD Plant 3D normally with the P600?




Thanks in advance 😄 and hope to be part of this impressive community in my near future. 

YS

[Tomislav.Golubovic · Accepted solution]

It'll work with pretty much anything, I've had gaming laptops in the past and it worked, and now have a workstation class laptop and it works, and on a HP Z800 with an RX580 card, and it works.

AutoCAD itself is a single threaded application, so its not really going to take advantage of having all of those cores - https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Support-...

I would go with the best GPU you can get, RAM, and a SSD+HDD because by the time you install the AEC Collection, if that's what you're going to use, the drive will be full.

I did some benchmarking with my PC's if you want to have a read - https://technexus.com.au/index.php/2019/01/20/benchmarking-my-pcs/

[Anonymous]

Thanks Tomislav.Golubovic!

Your reply and benchmark led me down a rabbit hole journey through benchmark websites about CPU and GPU technology and specifications. Just finished an intense afternoon of web reading. 

I'll be mostly using Plant 3D but will occasionally use the other AEC softwares too. So finally it's as you said, choose the best GPU, get tons of RAM (16-32GB) and have enough SSD and HDD capacity. Also I would add that people should choose the processor with the highest single core turbo speed since AutoCAD is mostly a single-threaded application (also turbo speed is nowadays more important than base speed since all modern processors are well-optimised to regularly dip into turbo mode)

With that said, I'll be getting the first option (i7-8750H) because of the higher core turbo speed and slightly better GPU. I'll also pump a little bit more cash and get an additional 1TB HDD to pair with the 512GB SSD. 

It pains me that I can't get a better graphics card. But I'll work with what I got. 

Thanks

[dgorsman]

Because you're getting a mobile workstation, pay attention to the configuration as well.  The default settings are usually for battery life which means speeds are throttled, hardware is turned off, and so on.  That will affect performance.