CAD PC Cheap

I am building a desktop PC for AutoCAD & 3D Studio.
What hardware / software components do you recommend?
My budget is $1500 (not including monitor).

The fastest cpu you can get! I myself am building a system for use with 3D Studio and I will buy a XP1400mhz, I think that will be enough.
>=256 DDR RAM
Large & fast harddrive (if your´e going to create animations you will need it!)
Get a fast graphicscard, like Geforce3 or Radeon8500

The more power you can get the better, but the single most important thing is memory, so try to get at least 512Mb.





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What! have I missed something here?
Render from HD?, hrmmm, If I´m not badly mistaken here a HD is A LOT slower than ordinary RAM, therefore it is very important to have lots of RAM, it doesn´t matter how fast processor you have if your´e memory is used up. The CPU will still have to wait for the HD to write data to the disk.
I can only speak for myself, but when I render a huge scene and my 256 mb of ram is used up, I can clearly see a performance drop when MAX starts accessing the HD.


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