Workstation Spec Recomendations?

[Anonymous]

Hey everyone,

I am going to be building some workstations for my Dad's office, which uses AutoCad and Revit for building designs

Anyways, I was wondering what the difference between a quadro P4000 and Radeon Wx 7100 is in terms of performance in Revit

Obviously, the P4000 will be a bit better, it costs more. However, using a Radeon WX 7100 would give me the money to put a 7820x in the PC, rather than a 6800K, or E5-2620 V4, the former of which has 12 threads, 4 less than the 7820x, and the latter is much slower, 2.1GHz as oppossed to the 7820x's 3.6GHz

thanks for any help

[amorap]

I dont know the amount of your budget.

In my opinion, Xeon CPUs are intended to server computers rather than workstation, and they need in most cases ECC RAM wich is much more expensive than non-ECC. For the price of an average Xeon-based machine you can build a much more powerful computer for workstation applications.

I would give a try to AMD Ryzen 7 CPU. It is cheaper than i7 and the real performance in most cases are equal or better. i7 is a good choice too rather than Xeon. (I have an AMD 7 Ryzen, a dual Xeon, and four i7 based workstaions, with a mix of GTX and Quadro videocards).

About GPUs, my choice would be a gamers video card. Nvidia GTX cards are performing quite well. Quadro videocards (intended for professional workstations) are overpriced in comparison to the GTX ones and overall performance are similar or even worse. The only advantage of Quadro cards is given by the driver, not by the hardware (basically Quadro and GTX are almost equal or very similar), but to obtain a slight advantage, the Quadro driver mus be optimized for your app.

Maybe in an scenario with only AutoCAD running, the Quadro videocards would be a better choice, but nowadays this is not real. In an AEC office we are working with a handful of programas, like AutoCAD, Revit, Lumion, and maybe in a future with virtual reality or augemented reality (Unity, unreal...)... some of that works much better with gamers videocards.

Regards from Spain.