sarahjoey78 :
I'm looking into building a desktop to run all my autocad products and adobe creative suite. I've talked to a few people and think I have it narrowed down to an intel core i7 2600 processor, but i'm not sure what other components I need to buy with it. I only want to spend around $1,000, so I'm looking for the best performance for that amount. Any input help. Thanks!
Hi,
I use the exact same CPU in both my CAD machines at work, they are perfectively suited to the job. I do have a question before I try ot advise.
Will the machine be used for gaming as well as 2D design and Adobe Suite? If not, I would advise going for either NVidia Quadro or ATI FirePro for the graphics cards, SLi is up to you. I use NVidia Qaudro 600's in my machines as they are great for 2D/3D work and don't cost a bomb. RAM should be ECC ram but does not need to be, I'd go for atleast DDR3 1066MHz but 1333Mhz is better. Not sure how much you would need, again depends on the work you do but safe side would be 6GB-8GB. I went with 10K SCSi drives in my config in RAID1 and RAID0 with sperate controller but standard 7.2K SATA drive will be fine.
It's hard to make a more accurate decision without more information on the overall use of the machine and what software you plan to run on it but hope the above points you in the right direction.