Laptop Workstation Suggestions for Civil3D 2023

[lleffler]

Hi all,

I work in civil consulting and am looking for help finding the best option on the market for a laptop workstation. 

I have referenced SourceCAD (https://www.thesourcecad.com/best-laptop-autocad/#:~:text=How%20good%20are,threaded%20operations%20m...) and would consider myself an intermediate to advanced user sometimes working with large data sets. 

I'm looking for a laptop so that I can work in office and remote settings. The majority of my work is Civil3D design - pipe and pressure networks, grading, site layouts and design, profile creation, sheet sets, etc.

Pretty broad request, but wanted to see what's working best for other civil design consultants.

Thanks!

[rkmcswain]

Processor: Highest clock speed you can get - forget the number of cores. AutoCAD is single threaded. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html will allow you to compare STR.

RAM: 32/64 - how much are you using now? (If applicable)

Video: I find for many applications, users overspend here. How much are you doing with point clouds, complex corridors, etc?

HDD: AutoCAD reads/writes to the HDD a lot - get a fast SSD.

Out of several hundred C3D users here, we only have a few that need anything beyond a standard spec of i7, 32GB Ram, A2000 Nvidia, and an M.2 SSD

[ChrisRS]

Good timing!

AutoCAD 2024 was released today. (March 28, 2023)

Memory - Basic: 8 GB, Recommended: 32 GB,  Display Card  - Basic: 2 GB, Recommended: 8 GB)

(For reference 2023 = Memory - Basic: 8 GB, Recommended: 16 GB,  Display Card  - Basic: 1GB, Recommended: 4 GB)

Civil 3D 2023 was released on April 12, 2022 with the same 8/16 and 1/4 requirements as AutoCAD 2023.

It is reasonable to expect C3D 2024 to be released in a similar time frame.

Edit: This morning (March 29, 2023) I received an invitation regarding an April, 18, 2023 presentation:
Link - What’s New for Civil 3D, InfraWorks, and ReCap Pro 
Presumably, C3D will be released prior to April 18.

System Requirements Link:  https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/forums/replypage/board-id/66/message-id/489440

[ChrisRS]

I edited message 3:

Edit: This morning (March 29, 2023) I received an invitation regarding an April, 18, 2023 presentation:
Link - What’s New for Civil 3D, InfraWorks, and ReCap Pro 
Presumably, C3D will be released prior to April 18.

[lleffler]

Thanks everyone! I've been referencing minimum requirements but was hoping for more specifics on brands/setups you've used and liked and ones that haven't worked well.

[andrewpuller3811]

Don't use the minimum requirements, especially with civil 3d. Our IT department used to get minimum spec PC and we wasted more in time lost due to crashes than a high spec machine is worth.

We are running Dell Precision 7560 15" laptops with 11th gen i7-11800H running at 2.3 GHz (turbo up to 4.3 GHz), 32GB ram, Nvidia Quadro T1200 and 512Gb KXG60ZNV5512G NVMe drive.

This spec works quite well for us running civil 3d with medium size projects on a daily basis with medium to large model in Infraworks on occasion and large point clouds in Recap, Infraworks and Civil 3d.

As stated above, a high base clock would be better, along with a faster SSD would be nice, but this works well for us.

[lleffler]

Thank you! Yes, this has been a struggle for us and our IT department - we've been meeting minimum requirements and have had so much lost time recently (updating to 2023), that we're trying to find a setup worth investing in. I'll look into Dell Precision, but do you have a 'dream setup' that would have the higher base clock and faster SSD?   

I've been comparing Lenovo ThinkPad P15v, MSI Raider, and a few others looking for 32+ GB of RAM. Is a 3840 x 2160 4k Display worth it for general design purposes (grading, pipe networks, etc.)? Do you have a preference of Intel or AMD? 

[lleffler]

Thank you! Do you have a setup you're partial to?  I've found referencing minimum requirements is a good starting point but often leads to issues and lost time dealing with crashes.

[ChrisRS]

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@lleffler wrote:

... Is a 3840 x 2160 4k Display worth it for general design purposes (grading, pipe networks, etc.)?  

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My opinion is that it is not worth it.

1920 x 1080 (FHD) is adequate for a 17", 16:9, laptop. I am not sure about the taller 16:10 screens.

My eyesight is 20-20 with glasses. I use a 17" laptop. MS Office programs and AutoCAD/Civil 3D are good. The icons are a bit small, but very useable because they are familiar. I do not use any Windows or AutoCAD display scaling. 

On as 17" screen, at 3840x 2160 (4K), the UI would be way to small. One pixel wide lines would be hard to see. You would probably want to display line widths. A 4K image has 4 times as many pixels as a FHD image. It takes more computation effort to push around 4 times as many pixels.

My 49" 4K TV, used as an external monitor, works fine without any display scaling. I can preview a 24" x 36" drawing at full size.

If you have access to a 4K monitor, take a screen capture of AutoCAD/C3D running full screen. Save it to a thumb drive and view the image on a 4K laptop. (COSTCO and Best Buy let me do this.) 

I may update this post later. Few screen resolution discussions address pixels per inch (PPI) and readability.

Good Luck!

[ChrisRS]

"This is not the droid you are looking for ..."

I mentioned my setup in message 9.

I am a one-person shop and use a ready-for-replacement, out-of-date, 17", 16 GB, laptop. 

I'm too lazy to look up the exact specs, but they would be useless to you.

(Grammarly did not like the term "one-man.")

[m_kingdon]

I mostly work on Civil 3D and Infraworks remotely on my laptop, I also moonlight as a photographer. After months of research I finally settled on the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. I believe the Legion 5 Pro is the best all-rounder machine for the money. It is powerful, has a large beautiful screen and is rugged. It is slightly heavy but the lighter laptops with similar specs were much more expensive. There is an Intel and AMD option, both good options but I think the Intel option is better this year.

[ChrisRS]

Looks nice.

I can see how a better resolution would be nice for photography work.

Do you do any display scaling for AutoCAD/Infraworks?

[londal]

I want to see Autodesk have specs requirements for POWER USERS! Enough of the minimal specs to eventually crash a computer and not be able to process lidar and point clouds.  🙂

[pendean]

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@londal wrote:

I want to see Autodesk have specs requirements for POWER USERS! Enough of the minimal specs to eventually crash a computer and not be able to process lidar and point clouds.  🙂

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https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/System-requirement...

If that's not enough, post over HERE to get Autodesk's attention since that's where they look for feedback 

[rkmcswain]

@londal wrote:

I want to see Autodesk have specs requirements for POWER USERS! Enough of the minimal specs to eventually crash a computer and not be able to process lidar and point clouds.

They have to be conservative, they don't want to scare off potential customers with super high end hardware requirements.

[andrew_iannello62A3A]

Everyone commenting here has no idea what they are on about, except for Londal.  Because AutoCAD is a single core application you don't need a high-end CPU. You need maximum RAM to feed the instructions to the cores and get maximum efficiency. You need a second SSD setup as a page file to store the project data sets and not chew up your RAM.  You can spec a lower workstation PC with 128GB++ of RAM and a 512GB SSD as a page file. Don't by off the shelf and don't go by the Autodesk recommendation. There minimum and recommended is well below the mark, these developers have no idea of what it takes to turn a dollar. 

You shouldn't be sitting around waiting for your computer to process instructions, on your 100-300Ha sites, this is what will happen if you stick with basic recommendations. It will end up costing you in downtime.  When you could have thrown in a few sticks of memory for a few hundred bucks.

All those suggestions above are killing our industry, because corporates will look up this information and use it as a guide. You are stifling the industry.  If you don't understand it, my opinion is you keep your mouth shut, because the damage you're doing to industry through commentary like is enormous. It is a major factor of project cost blowouts. Which is essentially our tax dollars. I'm fed up with it, if you couldn't already tell 🙂

[rkmcswain]

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@andrew_iannello62A3A wrote:

Everyone commenting here has no idea what they are on about

Wow, that's a pretty broad statement.

@andrew_iannello62A3A wrote:
Because AutoCAD is a single core application

                      I specifically said this in post #2

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@andrew_iannello62A3A wrote:
....don't go by the Autodesk recommendation. There minimum and recommended is well below the mark, these developers have no idea of what it takes to turn a dollar

                    I covered this too, in the post right above yours.

We have some PCs with 256GB RAM and they do not run C3D any faster than the ones with 32 or 64 GB. Perhaps that allows you to open more huge drawings, but drawing a polyline or building a surface isn't going to run any faster because of RAM.  Having that second SSD and striping the data as RAID 0 has shown to have benefit. If you watch AutoCAD file activity, it's constantly reading and writing to the %temp% folder so anything to increase that speed will be noticeable.

[teerawat.pSCHYQ]

@lleffler , I would recommend that you should go to laptop for workstation model such as Lenovo Thinkpad P series, HP zBook series, or if you like Dell, you can go to Dell  Precision series.  

[andrew_iannello62A3A]

Excellent points.

My experience is noticeable increases in overall speed with greater than 64GB RAM and limited to 128GB. I haven't been as high as 256GB, good to hear your observation.  Noticeable differences in performance were with feature lines and gradings.   Greater gains come from the SSD with productivity around all the main issues, autosaves, cursor pauses and command delays, function recalcs, crashes and stability. We also found measurably less CPU interrupts pre-post upgrade, especially with large sites (broad acre agriculture, massive surveys etc)

Having moved back into engineering consulting from construction and having to still after being absent for 5years have these conversations, it is extremely disappointing. I find these debates cyclic within our industry. Seemingly the bean counters are settled on an inaction KPI, and they cling to certain articles such as the opinion of some of the users suggesting far less specifications. This has got harder to manage across large organisations shifting to rental schemes. Where in construction if you don't have to tools you need, you go get them, it's a 100% backing of the individual performing the job. Productivity & Confidence equals $$ and they recognise that.  The two industries are chalk and cheese.

I might have skimmed over your previous post, apologies.