Please advise the new builder for CAD & 3d rendering

[fred9999]

Dear all, I m going to build a machine for Auto CAD, Revit, 3ds Max rendering & sketchup. My budget is around 1000 pounds Please give me some advise.

CPU Intel Sandybridge i7-2600K Unlocked Core i7 Quad-Core Processor (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache, Socket 1155) £240
CPU Fan Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus (fan bracket version) Processor cooler £23
Graphic card NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 by PNY Graphics card - 768 MB - GDDR3 SDRAM £378
Monther board ASUS P8Z68-V Pro £147
RAM (4gx4) Kingston ValueRAM 4 GB Memory - DIMM 240-pin - 1333 MHz ( PC3-10600 ) £66
hard drive WD Caviar Black 1 TB - 600 MBps - 7200 rpm £109
PC case Coolermaster Elite 330 Case With Coolermaster eXtreme Power 500W PSU £50

Also if you can recommend a monitor for me as well? Thanks

 

[sosofm]

My advice is to buy 2X 8 Gb RAM, because maybe you will need to upgrade your RAM memory to more than 16GB.If you buy 4 X 4GB you will not have place for upgrade. You need an IPS pannel monitor. DELL make verry good IPS pannel monitors.

 

[JohnA]

The guys I work with do a lot of work with point clouds and 16G is the minimum for now, and as the other poster said it wont be long before you want to upgrade. Overall, I like the system choices you made, but you will probably need to add more hard drive soon, if your not dumping it all off to a server.

It is very common for people to raid systems like this so you don't lose work. Everything other than the laptops are for us. Even if you have an aggressive backup plan, I'd suggest it's worth the money. It's also much faster to restore your system if a HD does fail. As soon as you have everything up and patched, don't forget to do your first restore image to remote storage.

We've only used Dell monitors and have been pleased with them.

 

[abekl]

Get the Cooler Master 212 EVO instead of the plus. You'll be glad you did.

 

[Max1s]

Well I agree that backups are important, but with HD prices like they are it might not be worth it to go crazy with tons of disks for RAID.

 

[cadder]

AutoCAD and Revit seem to like to read from the hard drive frequently, so I think an SSD for the system disk is worthwhile, at least 120GB. Our revit models tend to be pretty big too so even saving to a local hard drive takes a good amount of time. None of our CAD machines have enough local SSD space in order to store the local copy of the Revit model. The next Revit machines I build will be better in that regards.