AutoCAD vs AutoCAD LT

If your worried about cost then look at this product "Advanced Road Design" sold here in Aus but available around the world runs on Briscad, about 1/2 price of an Autocad CIV3d, surfaces, gradings, roads, intersections, drain and sewer pipes what more do you want. The director of the product has been around since 1980's selling civil software world wide so he knows what he is doing, yeah I am biased worked for him, we run it now on top of CIV3D, no offence but the Autodesk guys could learn a lot about simplicity and interface ease. http://www.advancedroaddesign.com.au I have been in touch with one of the local consulatants that I worked for who bought this and they have given up on their Terra Model for it and are very happy and they just churn out house lots.

Glen1980 I will back my guys any day that they will be in the pub wednesday

I asked the engineers if they wanted Civils 3d they researched it and said no. That plan you've attached looks more complex and way larger than anything we do. The only time we did an estate anywhere near on that scale the roads and drainage were already in we just built the houses. Mostly we do blocks of flats and have small estate roads going to small parking areas and the guys feel happy doing that without civils 3d but they do want AutoCAD and software plugins such as PDS and Microdrainage. Also in their defence they have never missed a deadline (unlike us architectural boys!)

to all the others, saying go for this product etc. you obviously have never worked with a

small very small company Yes, I have. Five people.

a company that has never had or deemed the need for "cad" Yes, I have and I was the one who convinced them to buy full AutoCAD, hire their first CAD tech and send her (that's right...a woman) for training.

tried to extract thousands of pounds from a director for something that "fastcad" can do for less £100 in his eyes. Why would I choose a program that counts its number of users on less than ten fingers and was not being used by the other disciplines we worked with?

ReMark, I would say that from my experiences on this forum that the construction industry in the UK appears to be a lot less progressive and funded than in the US. You wouldn't believe the pangs of jealousy I get reading the specs of the computers and software you all seem to be routinely given! Its only been in the last 2 years that our dedicated architectural team have been given workstations (most of those are barely CAD spec) and only now that we are considering BIM and 3d software for our engineers. Architecture and engineering just seems to be regarded as a necessary evil in the industry but you watch them squirm if we can't give them a drawing telling them how to get out of their own mess!

remark, as Glen says the attitude must be different across the pond. trying to get people to invest approx £10,000 for software, hardware, training, lost productivity etc is a task, especially when they dont fully underdstand the benifits.

i am in a design office of 23, and this week we got our first decent hardware in design. all my boss sees is a PC that has cost him £1600, when he csn go to PC world and but a pc for £200. he has no interest to want to know the differences in running a Quadpro card over an on boars. hell he doesnt even know what it means. what he csres about is why i want and additional £1400 of his proffit per person to do what we do anyway, make drawings. i cant give him a return on that straight away, and its almost impossible to quantify the difference in monetry terms.

I'm not saying it's right and I doubt MonkeyTurnip ot Tom133 is either but it's what we have to deal with. Most of the management we have now barely did any CAD and think it'll work on any old bit of hardware. I've been on at them until I'm blue in the face but the British attitude is if it isn't broken don't fix it. Although not broken it isn't efficient or user friendly but they don't care (majorly cleaned up for forum rules compared to what I want to type, it involves a word that rhymes with duck!)

To Glen and original OP we run 2013 because our hardware does not work with 2015 so we are waiting for 2016 I guess now March but at least we will get upgraded unfortunately within the company specs but we can try to get better so long as our supplier can source it as a standard build very large computer brand. Moral try and get the best you can.

BIGAL the other thing I forgot to mention is all of the places I have interviewed at use LT for architecture. Whereas I've been at my first job for 14 years, as they let me have the office copy of Vanilla AutoCAD when the CGI guy got laid off then last year they gave me Building Design Suite Premium. This seems quite unusual unless you are at a private practice that utilises Revit.

we use LT here, 23 guys with a construction company

we have 2 full network licences avaliable to everyone too if they need to do some 3D etc. but 99% of the time its LT and 2D. we also have 2 revit LT licences we are training with, exploring how we csn use them to benifit us as a company. once i can prove usefulness we will start geting B&D premium network. but we also need to upgrade the PCs. so without autodesk software the pcs are £2000

thats for a Workstation, setup fee, office etc.

then we are looking at £2000 of training per person over 6 months with an expected loss of productivity of around £2000-3000 per person

The BDSP Revit is much more capable as it has structure and M&E revits included LT lacks these (I've just subscribed to LT at home so I can Revit in my own time!) We are currently using i5 workstations with 16gb RAM and rubbish graphics cards and it still works OK even on the job I'm doing where I've modelled the timber roof structure. I've just build a new system as listed in this thread http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?90654-Revit-amp-AutoCAD-LT-Workstation-Build-or-Buy I also got some really good advice on RevitForum.org. The initial set up cost is horrendously high to us as people but just remind them how much they spend on one bit of site plant (or the MDs Bentley) and that its an infrastructure investement.