Glen1980 Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 We are just about to start a trial of Revit Architecture. Due to the small price difference I've convonced them to use the Premium Building Design Suite so we get full CAD as a fall back plus we can do som elight rendering for showing stuff to the boss. Currently I have a HP Elite 8300 CMT that has an i5 processor and 8gb of RAM and a Quadro 600 that isn't on the Revit recommended list. IT are sourcing me another 8 gigs of Ram and are looking at graphics cards for me. Its probably down to the Quadro K600 or the AMD firepro v4900 ATI Fire GL. Does anyone have an opinion on which is the most suitable for Revit? I've looked at both of the manufacturers web pages and they don't make it easy to compare specs beyond memory capacity! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
f700es Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 In the same boat here Glen. I am getting a new pc for the other space manager here and it needs to run CAD and Revit. I am leaning towards a high end consumer desktop for the moment. We are tied into Dell and Lenovo. I am looking at a 4th gen core i7, 16gb ram, ssd and hdd mix. I am still not convinced that a quadro is the best solution for Revit and CAD. Maybe the Revit users can chime in and give us a run down of what they use. What I can tell you is to stay away from ATI like the plague. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tzframpton Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 Best performance increase by far is a high-performance SSD drive. Get something that is rated in the 90,000 iops range, like this one. Just be sure your I.T. department understands that it needs to be a high-performance SSD and not a "regular" SSD, but a regular one still is much faster than a mechanical platter drive. Revit has no limits, really, since it's constantly performing calculations. Everything in Revit is directly tied to a database, so there's an inherent "lag" that people mistaken as performance. A $10k dream machine computer will still buckle under a large Revit job in some areas. But there is a sweet spot. Here are my personal "bare minimums" for a standard Revit machine: Core i7-4770K 16GB RAM bare minimum, 32GB preferred High-performance SSD Minimum 2GB GTX 700 series gaming card, 4GB Preferred Quadro 2000 workstation card minimum, Quadro 4000 preferred Run with those specs and see if it'll fit into your budget. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike_Taylor Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 Personally I would go with the Intel i7-4820k. Lower price and preforms slightly better than the 4770k. Keep in mind the speed of the RAM and clock speeds on your graphics card as well. They are very easy to overlook, but together can make a pretty significant performance boost (especially the clock speed on the GPU). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tzframpton Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 Personally I would go with the Intel i7-4820k. Lower price and preforms slightly better than the 4770k.Good tip. Newegg has these under the Ivy, which is why I missed it I guess. I wonder why that is? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
f700es Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 Why stop there, just grab the new 6-core units! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike_Taylor Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 Good tip. Newegg has these under the Ivy, which is why I missed it I guess. I wonder why that is? It uses the Ivy Bridge-E chipset rather than the Haswell. Only differences are the mother board requirements (LGA2011 for the 4820k and LGA1155 for the 4770k). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tzframpton Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 Hmm, still confusing since they say Haswell Architecture in the description. Either way, reviews are solid, everyone is saying it's faster than the 4770K. Really good find man, kudos! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike_Taylor Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 That's odd they say that, the socket is completely different, on NewEgg.ca it mentions it is different architecture, typo maybe? Its what I put in my computer at home. I went to run some benchmarks on the machine I built, but the case I ordered was too small and I didnt have the required airflow to overclock everything to the point I wanted. Ordered a new case on Wednesday so iw will hopefully give you a benchmark on it soon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen1980 Posted March 31, 2014 Author Share Posted March 31, 2014 Thanks Guys. We've been quoted for a Xeon system by the Autodesk reseller, but to convince the boss we aren't just telling him to spend 2k on top of the 6k per seat (we have 30) we want to try on our existing machines first. We are expecting to fail with the size of the developments we do and that everything we do is bespoke to the site (anything from 12 flats/houses up to a 300 houses/flats and a 27 storey apartment block with a nice deep basement to house a car stacker.) The specs quoted for are below, the IT guy can't get much better from any other suppliers. 1 Hewlett Packard Z420 Intel Xeon E5-1650 3.6 12M 1600 4C, 16 GB DDR3 RAM(4x4GB), 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD, 1 f700es (after 5 years here I still don't know your real name!) I'm only looking at Quadro and the AMD Fires as they are recommended by Autodesk. As my very occasional forays into gaming these days are smartphone or PS3 based I'm completely out of touch with GFX card technologies (and CPUS to be honest now) so I'm blindly following what AutoDesk have to say To give you an idea the last graphics card I sought out specifically rather than looking at prices first was a Voodoo 2 by creative labs (I think.) Tannar, Personally I think you are right with the SSD's. I added a SATA 2 SSD to my first gen i7 when it started slowing down and it ran soooo much better. I'd love to see what a high performance drive would do! So any prefences on those cards mentioned above or equally rubbish for Revit with my system? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tzframpton Posted March 31, 2014 Share Posted March 31, 2014 So any prefences on those cards mentioned above or equally rubbish for Revit with my system?You can go workstation class if you want, but AutoCAD and Revit platforms are adopting the Direct3D driver extensions now, putting gaming cards on the same playing level in performance, and in some cases out-performing the workstation counterpart. Over at RevitForum.org, there is a "Revit Benchmark" thread you can search (I think it's a Sticky), and you'll find gaming cards being used more and more with top level performance from Revit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen1980 Posted March 31, 2014 Author Share Posted March 31, 2014 Cheer Tannar. Will have a look there now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen1980 Posted March 31, 2014 Author Share Posted March 31, 2014 (edited) Here are my personal "bare minimums" for a standard Revit machine: Core i7-4770K 16GB RAM bare minimum, 32GB preferred High-performance SSD Minimum 2GB GTX 700 series gaming card, 4GB Preferred Quadro 2000 workstation card minimum, Quadro 4000 preferred Run with those specs and see if it'll fit into your budget. How about this one? http://www.ebuyer.com/618540-msi-geforce-gtx-750ti-gaming-2g-n750ti-tf-2gd5-oc We also need memory out of that £200. As an update, our reseller has sent me a load of samples including an 85mb database of a warehouse furniture. My i5 is a bit clunky when navigating around the model. The reseller know the work we do and says that our models could regularly be from this size up to 120mb. Would a memory and graphics card upgrade even help with the clunkiness? Shadows were off and it was set to consistent colours. Putting shadows on and making the colours realistic made it really bad! Edited April 1, 2014 by Glen1980 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tzframpton Posted March 31, 2014 Share Posted March 31, 2014 That video card is fine. It's a budget card but definitely will provide what you need for the next couple of years. You're going to need more processor and RAM with the amount of model information you guys will be designing. Anything multi-level with duplicate Model Groups and all the little details will definitely slow a model down. Processor, RAM, and high-end SSD's are an absolute must. The graphics won't help the "clunkliness" since Revit's constantly running database calculations, which is processor intensive. Due to the inherent nature, Revit has a "lag" to it that is all to familiar within the Revit community. *EDIT* I'd go with a 760 or 770 card if your budget allows. I've built two computers using the 770 and I know it's capabilities. See if that's possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen1980 Posted March 31, 2014 Author Share Posted March 31, 2014 Thanks again Tannar. That should be enough to go on to make a decision. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
f700es Posted April 1, 2014 Share Posted April 1, 2014 f700es (after 5 years here I still don't know your real name!) I'm only looking at Quadro and the AMD Fires as they are recommended by Autodesk. As my very occasional forays into gaming these days are smartphone or PS3 based I'm completely out of touch with GFX card technologies (and CPUS to be honest now) so I'm blindly following what AutoDesk have to say To give you an idea the last graphics card I sought out specifically rather than looking at prices first was a Voodoo 2 by creative labs (I think.) Hi Glen, I would still stay away from ATI cards. Nothing wrong with following AutoDesk's requirements but no harm in do your research as well. Good luck Sean (shhh, it's my real name ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen1980 Posted April 2, 2014 Author Share Posted April 2, 2014 Cheers Sean! Don't worry I won't tell anyone Got to say that after day one oft he course I am loving Revit! My major problem is that trim is the wrong way round! The worrying thing is that the reseller is also organizing the Autodesk approved course and they supplied the workstations. I was surprised that the desktops were relatively small as I was expecting huge great towers and was told "we only use these for training, they can't handle real work." I checked the spec's on one of their machines on My Computer and they are HP Elite 8300s only with an i7 processor and 32GB RAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tzframpton Posted April 2, 2014 Share Posted April 2, 2014 My major problem is that trim is the wrong way round!Ah, I remember this one. It took a while for my brain to reconfigure the functionality. Once I did I prefer it now. Got to say that after day one oft he course I am loving Revit!Great to hear Glen. Keep us posted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike_Taylor Posted April 2, 2014 Share Posted April 2, 2014 I am currently using 2 of these cards at home for my personal build (I have 1 installed in my old computer now while I polish my build off). They have a massive amount of RAM on them at a decent clock speed making it fantastic for large 3D models. From the computer I have here at work (has a Quadro K5000 and a Xeon E5-2687W (8 Cores at 3.40 GHz) and I fond my single 770 was ou preforming the K5000 (just in the graphics department). Its hard to compare as my own computer at home has a very poor processor. All in all, I think the gaming cards are the way to go. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen1980 Posted April 3, 2014 Author Share Posted April 3, 2014 Cheers Mike, thanks for the input. I've had IT get some prices on the GTX 7xx series and we'll go for the highest spec we can afford out of the budget. My Director has told me he accepts that we need new computers for larger projects than we are modelling (is that more correct than drawing?) for the trial so these cards may be a one off thing. I have suggested that these machines could go to the managers who only want to look at models rather than produce them. Day 2 of the course update. Loving it even more, we redrew everything we'd spent the first day learning, in about 45 minutes. Then we annotated it, put in rooms etc. He showed us how to colour all of the rooms using a legend, which whilst interesting isn't much use to us, our planning department will love it though. Then he showed us groups, family editing, creating simple extrusions for a family member (a gutter as an example.) Then he showed us how to crop the 3d model to show only one room then made the walls transparent. None of us can think of a practical use for this but its nice to know you can do it! We have two weeks on out own to draw up 12 houses of 6 types then he is coming back for the third day where he is going to show us how to set up the site and to put what we have drawn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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