Jump to content

Help me (IT Guy) build a couple of systems for my AutoCAD LT guys.


SE_Tech

Recommended Posts

Hello all, I have been reading and learning on here what I could so I have some idea, but I thought I'd better ask a couple of quick questions to ensure I'm building what my guys need. I'd appreciate any insight in to what will best suit my guys needs.

 

I need to build at least two complete systems from the ground up for them to use for AutoCAD LT 2015/16 on. This is used for building plans and site design work, everything at all to do with bringing a location out of the dirt. They are currently using basic i5 desktops with normal ATI dedicated graphics cards and 2 to 3 monitors. These are not performing well, mainly in graphics with noticable major lag even when just zooming in a out of a drawing.

 

I am looking for parts and am open to whatever as long as it works well and is reasonable in cost. I'm not a penny pincher but I do want bang for the buck and as there is no 3D work going on I'm not sure if that impacts my choices as most cards seem to be concentrating on the 3D aspect of AutoCAD.

 

I'm looking at the i7 processor, something like the 4790k which is 4ghz base clock and quad core. It seems the base clock is the most important part as more cores are not used by AutoCAD LT if I understand correctly? I would pair this with 16gb of RAM, a Samsung SSD and a better video card. Is this a correct direction, or do cores matter more and I should look at higher core count chips, move to Xeon or whatever?

 

Lastly would be the video card. Again this is 2D work, so I need to know what would work best for these users. I was looking at something like the AMD FirePro W4100 as it is new and pretty inexpensive and will do 4 monitors at 4k, or the W5100 with double the RAM if it is needed. Quadro is also a choice, but the cheapest card that seems capable is over one hundred dollars more and seems to only handle dual monitors? One machine will use dual monitors and one will have three. 2560x1440 dual existing monitors, or future 4k as needed.

 

If it is worth waiting on the 5th gen processors I will, or if Nvidia will be firing back at ATI with new cards I could wait too. I just want to get the systems working good for their needs. Let me know what you guys think, and if I'm looking right or need a whole new direction. I'll be personally building whatever we go with and will not be getting these from a builder like Dell.

 

Appreciate your time!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 40
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • JamCAD

    7

  • SE_Tech

    7

  • BlackBox

    6

  • f700es

    4

No one replied? That's unusual when it comes to requests for hardware setup.

 

I think there was another thread regarding LT and a computer setup within the last two days. Rather than repeat the same info here try searching for it. Maybe most of your questions will be answered.

 

We just bought one of our electricians a Dell desktop for running LT 2014 on. I'll see if I can dig out the specs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What's a budget? :)

 

 

I'll spend what it takes without going nuts. My build with the highest i7, motherboard, 16gb ddr3 2400 ram, case and power supply and 256gb Samsung 850 SSD and the w5100 FirePro was only like $1400. Seems cheap enough to me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I did a bit of research and came up with a list of parts recently. I had three separate builds. One for under $4k the other two for just over $2k. Note that I live in Australia so this is in AUD, and we get ripped off on prices down under. Here are the two links. The added bonus of answering your question is that I get feedback on other cad users on this forum about my build :-)

 

 

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/user/j0nat/saved/pmYwrH

 

The following two are virtually the same, I just tweaked a bit to get as close to 2k as possible.

 

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/user/j0nat/saved/6bWPxr

 

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/user/j0nat/saved/BC3dnQ

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quad Core i5's are good for normal, non 3D or rendering work. Current versions (Haswell, I think) will do. The main difference between i7s and i5s are the i7s are hyper threaded. Get as fast a clock speed as you can find.

Stay away from ATI/AMD video cards. I can't stress this enough. nVidia is the way to go. Look at low to mid range GTX models. A guadro is WAY overkill for 2D AutoCAD work. Save your money for other areas. Newegg.com has a Zotac nVidia GTX 750ti, 2GB GDDR, supports 4 displays for $240. The GTX series will have better, memory band width, high clock speed and more GPU cores.

Here is a summary of a comparison of AutoCAD 2D performance with workstation and consumer video cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/workstation-graphics-2013/05-AutoCAD-2013-2D-Performance-Summary,3281.html

Yes the quadro came out on top but for the price difference it is simply not worth it. 3D performance in AutoCAD with the GTX is even better. Again, this is for AutoCAD. Other applications will benefit from a quadro, Autocad will not.

SSD is also the way to go for primary hard drive. 16 GB ram is also good. You can see my work PC specs, under my name on the left.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To me the average size seems small, 10-15mb files seem to be pretty average. They are breaking things up into smaller files though due to the performance issues they have ran into.

 

 

I did search and read threads here and in the AutoCAD LT area back to over a year old. I read several build questions but most seemed to be 3D oriented. I searched a few times but could not get decent results though I did try. I know in forums it is annoying when people keep rehashing the same old stuff so I tried to look for similar threads but ended up asking.

 

 

I do not need monster info, just basics on the video cards and processor mainly as I just want to make the CAD guys happy and want to ensure I'm headed in the right direction. I'm sure all the IT guys care as much about the CAD guys right? I appreciate all the replies, and if there is a better thread covering this once I find it feel free to remove this one as needed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To me the average size seems small, 10-15mb files seem to be pretty average. They are breaking things up into smaller files though due to the performance issues they have ran into.

 

 

A 10-15mb file is actually a little big for an AutoCAD 2D drawing. You might want to talk to them and make sure they are utilizing xrefs and blocks to their advantage to keep file sizes down.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'll spend what it takes without going nuts.

 

The specs in my profile (left sidebar) was put together for about 2k.

We run Civil 3D 2015 on these machines w/o any issues, meaning that's a bit overkill for just AutoCAD LT...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I will ask them if they do, I personally have no idea what they are doing day to day in drawings. Many of the drawings are smaller, 3-5mb but the full site overviews get bigger as mentioned above. Those are multi acre sites with grading, drainage, buildings, electrical, you name it all in a single overview drawing.

 

 

If a Quadro is overkill what about a GTX960 as a good card? That's a $200 card and would get them moved to Nvidia without spending too much. That makes the whole i7 build come in at $1100 which seems to be super cheap to my thinking.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

$200 for a GTX960 seems to be a good deal. PCIe 3.0, 1024 Cuda cores and 2 GDDR5 ram. Make sure you get a good power supply for this one. My Dell i7 system came in at $1,600 (i7 4770 @ 3.4 GHz, 16 gb ddr, 256gb SSD hdd0, 1TB hdd1, DVD, DVD-R/W and GTX650) so $1,100 does seem like a deal.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10-15MB file size does seem large. Do you, as a matter of habit, utilize such commands as Overkill, -Purge and Audit?

 

Working with Civil 3D, I frequently have large surface models for urban land projects that range from 150-200 MB each (one for existing, one for clearing & grubbing, proposed, etc.). Most non-model (XREF\DREF only) drawings are relatively small 1-20 MB, but the file size did bloat when Autodesk moved from Land Desktop's external database, to the internal database within Civil 3D.

 

That said, for vanilla geometry and annotations, I've yet to find anything as efficient as the WBLOCK Command for stripping out only what one needs, and the vla-WBlock LispFunction makes it really easy to use on the fly. :thumbsup:

 

Cheers

Link to comment
Share on other sites

$200 for a GTX960 seems to be a good deal. PCIe 3.0, 1024 Cuda cores and 2 GDDR5 ram. Make sure you get a good power supply for this one. My Dell i7 system came in at $1,600 (i7 4770 @ 3.4 GHz, 16 gb ddr, 256gb SSD hdd0, 1TB hdd1, DVD, DVD-R/W and GTX650) so $1,100 does seem like a deal.

 

Working with Civil 3D here, so take from this what you like....

 

I run a Dell Precision T3600, Hex-Core Xeon, 32 GB RAM, 2 x 250 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD in RAID 0 (OS, Win8.1x64), 250 GB SSD (Disaster Recovery), 1 TB Western Digital Velociraptor 10K RPM HDD (Data), 3 x Gigabit NIC (for Client Hyper-V VMs for Autodesk, Microsoft Beta testing, and server management), 3 GB NVIDIA Quadro K4000, with 3 x 24" monitors.

 

 

 

I believe it was the OP who mentioned that AutoCAD products were single threaded, and they're correct (unfortunately).

 

However, and I do not know if this applies to LT or not honestly, vanilla AutoCAD and its verticals now come with Core Console (AcCore.dll, etc.) which does support multi-threaded operation when executed in parallel, or you can simply perform a give task in series (still in a separate thread from that of main application window).

 

Methinks this is all well and nice, but not sure how much applies to OP's situation directly... I only thought to share, in the event they're currently looking at LT, but might consider full version if they knew some of this is in fact available to them with a different subscription, etc. Full version, even of vanilla, opens the door to a whole host of production gains by way of automation. :thumbsup:

 

Cheers

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alright then, now that Nvidia and i7 is an acceptable answer this is pretty easy. My build will be as follows:

 

Asus z97 MATX motherboard for $127. (32gb ram max)

Intel i7 4790k 4.0ghz base clock with 4.4 max at default with no overclocking for $335

CM N200 case for $50

Corsair 750w modular power supply for $80

Samsung 850evo 256gb for $119

GTX960 graphics card for $200

16gb ( 2x8gb )f DDR3 2400 ram with XMP profiles for $125

Hyper 212 CPU cooler for $30

 

No CD/DVD drive needed as they are never used anymore and if needed we have a couple portable blu-ray burners that can be used as needed. That puts my total cost below $1100 for what should be a great system. No further storage space is needed as the network storage is available and where all files are at. I think that is a great price for all very high quality parts. Should be a massive improvement I think. While I could maybe go less in some areas the savings are not enough, so lets go big!

 

We do not foresee anything else besides AutoCAD LT being used here for anything at all. Maybe way down the road, but that would be a whole new position in the department so I'd be getting a machine for them then anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Out of curiosity, what environment are you running (server side)? Any RDS\VDI?

 

I just upgraded my new employer last year, from Windows Server 2003 SBS, Exchange Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2, Exchange 2013, installed a new server (primary), and upgraded storage, memory, NICs, and added second procs for our two legacy servers as secondary and tertiary replicas (Hyper-V).

 

Cheers

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Many of the drawings are smaller, 3-5mb but the full site overviews get bigger as mentioned above. Those are multi acre sites with grading, drainage, buildings, electrical, you name it all in a single overview drawing.

 

 

Everything in the same drawing? Definitely look into using Xrefs to separate out things like grading/drainage, electrical, building, etc. into their own files. Doing that should reduce the file sizes and possible solve some of the problems they've been having. Also, as ReMark mentioned, get into the habit of Purging and Auditing drawings on a regular basis to keep them clean and streamlined.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Cad64 - Believe me I agree with you, and many are broken up into smaller pieces but some are still pretty complex. One of my guys would do it another way but he is outvoted by the other one who you cannot get to change anything. At all. Good times there but a whole different issue. :D

 

 

 

 

BlackBox - We are a VMware house and we do a ton of RDS. Over half of our users utilize RDS daily as normal operation and it works great. I built new servers a couple of years ago and upgraded the whole spectrum, new drives, processors, servers, ram and all. New boxes and VMware we were able to retire many old servers as the new ones could do so much more. We dumped Exchange then and move to a hosted Exchange solution and it is working out well and the cost vs. keeping exchange up to date and storing everything locally worked out just fine. Happy we made the change, one less thing to mess with. Upgraded our local side and the D&R site too.

 

 

The next upgrade my goal is to move to total SSD solution on the servers and storage!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

This is a very late update but I wanted to update you all and also say thank you again for all the assistance. I did end up building two of these machines for the Construction guys here and they have been working great for over two months now. Truly a massive improvement and they were both amazed at how much of an improvement there was.

 

Ended up with:

 

Asus Z97M Plus

 

i7 4790k which runs at 4ghz.

 

CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler.

 

Corsair RM650 gold certified power supply. Overkill but a great price at the time so why not!

 

Samsung 850 Evo 256gb.

 

Nvidia GTX 960 2gb (overclocked version again good deal on sale)

 

16gb DDR3 2400 memory, running at 2400 just fine.

 

CoolerMaster N200 case.

 

 

Systems run great and all told the hardware only ran around $1100 for each machine. Not bad at all and it was very much worth it to get them running at full speed. Nvidia cards are running better than our old ATI cards ever did so thanks for that information. Neat features on the systems are that the power supply and the graphics card both will totally shut the fans off when the machines are running more idle, or just emailing and such and not stressed. Cool feature with the systems being almost totally silent and should result in very much improved life in the fans. Seems like every card around here with a fan the fan is the first thing to go so I'm hoping these live longer.

 

In the end, just wanted to say thanks for being helpful to a newbie on here, it was very much appreciated. :beer:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


×
×
  • Create New...