i'll be building a PC for my sister. she'll be using it for her day to day work, which is mostly Word, and Google Docs and what not. pretty light stuff. shes been using Photoshop, and shes getting into video creation/editing and i'd assume rendering the videos.
what she wants is something thats a solid foundation of a PC for that stuff, if you know what a mean. something that she can upgrade or build on. i told her to expect to spend around $1000(CAD).
now the part of the build i'm stuck on, is the CPU(no fan boys plz :P). everyone seems to just say "i7"! what about an i5-4690, Xeon or an FX-8350? i mean i could go with an i7 but then i'd be stuck with 8gb(1866) of ram, and no ssd. but hey if the i7 is just the no brainer for a solid PC, for what she wants to do with it, then which i7?
Check out the pricing on the xeon variants of the i7 quad-cores like the Xeon E3-1231V3. They are like 50 bucks cheaper here in the U.S. and since you aren't overclocking them expensive motherboard isn't necessary.
Now, maybe some one could chime in with some knowledge, but i am not 100% sure if autocad favors openCL, Cuda, or what. (EDIT: seems they use DirectX now?) but i did look up some benchmarks, and the 960 seems to be pretty good with it.
obviously the case is preference (this one doesn't have a disk drive bay), and there is no included OS. but, this should be pretty beast. left the stock cooler, since you can't overclock. but if you wanted, you could slap a Hyper 212 on there.
yup, that's what happens when you are up for 24hours @_@ can' read shit. However, it still stands that someone more knowledgeable would weigh in on the video editing part. Is rendering mostly done on the CPU, or can such things be offloaded to GPUs?
If you/she doesn't plan on overclocking go with a Xeon. They are cheaper than an i7 (atleast in the US) and only lack overclocking and a few other features (SLI/CrossFireX). If you don't get a graphics card make sure you buy a Xeon with an iGPU. There is a benchmark on CPU-World comparing an i7-4790 and a Xeon 1231-V3 and they are practically identical in speed and performance at stock speeds.
so this is what i've come up with so far. i found the mobo for about $130. i know its a bit on the expensive side, but it has SO many usb ports lol, and the flexibility to go SLI or Crossfire if need be. might just start out with 8GB of RAM, but we'll see