Hi! I'm Building 2 PCs for my girlfriend, and my little brother. Both are Engineers in college and need to run CAD. (Specifically Solidworks.) I've built half a dozen gaming rigs for myself and friends, but never a machine specifically for CAD. Lady's budget: $500 (US) -really only needs it for CAD. Bro's Budget: $800 (Also US)- wants one for light CAD, and a bunch of gaming. I've done TONS of research online, and I can't find a conclusive suggestion for a budget CAD computer for students. What I have found is that poeple can't agree on whether a nice gaming card like a GeForce 700 series would work fine, or if you NEED a Workstation card like a Quadro or FirePro to run CAD well. What do you guys think? I've found the AMD FirePro V4900 card, which seems to be a good all-around CAD card, and not too expensive, but I don't know enough about non-gaming cards to make a good judgement.
Also: any recommendations for Processors? I'm an AMD fanboy as far as budget builds like these are concerned, but I'm more than willing to try Intel if that's the best thing for this build?
Is it possible? Can I build a nice desktop for this budget? (I already have WIndows 7, and keyboards and mice.)
I've been running pretty complicated CAD (autodesk AutoCAD) on my good old RADEON HD5870, and I've experienced no problems or lag that got in the way of my work. I believe the questions you should ask yourself is: Would it increase their utility if they could also game on the machines? How large scale projects do they have to work on and in what applications? For instance, autodesk inventor can be run decently on this gen apu's, but solidworks is generally much more heavy, but depends on the solution you're running, and what you're building. By no means are firepros or quadros a necessity - and especially not on that type of budget, but they provide a much better experience - but if your company is not paying for it, I wouldn't do that investment.
For something extremely budget here is a build that I did for my school a while ago (or very similar, built three of them with a 1.5K usd limit, but we had GPUs laying around): http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wRfJQ7 It will run Solidworks VERY well, provided you don't mind a little slowing down when you get to assemblies with hundreds of parts floating around. Rendering with Photoview was not half bad either. If you want to make that gaming ready, just toss in a 960 or 970 and you are good to go.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/BkGWvK A gaming rig, probably. It will do CAD just fine, and game just fine. Render times are probably much improved?
For the record, Solidworks loves workstation cards, but at this budget, it is not worth the extra money at all. All the workstation cards will do is improve accuracy of the model that you are looking at and make it prettier, there is no real functional difference. On another note, Solidworks also runs very well on laptops, I have a Lenovo G510 (picked up on sale for almost 600 USD) which only has an iGPU and I can work on the same parts/assemblies that I made on the budget rigs, and on my own rig without any issues.
Should up that first build to an 8350e by switching out the GPU for a 260x, they should still be around 100 dollars.
Second build probably doesn't need that CPU cooler, or the 280x, depends on what they want, but the money saved could easily go to something like a silence optimized case.
This is great! Thanks! That first link is WAY under budget, which gives me space to add a monitor, or a new, fancy graphics card! Nice to finally find someone who has actually used CAD on a rig like what I'm looking for! I searched for AGES to find someone like that! Right on!
I don't think they'll be building battleships or anything SUPER intense; it'll mostly just be for schoolwork I think. I suppose a nice gaming card will do great, then! Awesome! That was my biggest concern. Thanks!
Just a fun fact. I was using my setup for doing boat designs in the 40ft range but without detailed fittings although basic fittings where of course on the models. :) Good luck with the machines and the studies.
Yeah, I think I may skip on the Coolers; I HIGHLY doubt that they will want to overclock their rigs, and with these builds, I don't think they'll need to, either. Thanks!
But remember workstations have to be fairly quiet - personally I get extremely annoyed by loud coil whine and vibration from hdd's that are not properly seated on silicone grommets. This can be easily avoided by buying a decent case (like fractal which has nice stock fans), and upgrading the bundled cpu cooler to something like the low end noctua coolers.
Thanks, guys! You've been super helpful. I think that these are the builds I'm gonna go with. They'll probably pick out their own cases, but other than that, it'll probably be similar to these: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/WGmydC -$500