AutoCAD hardware
 

I've been tasked with speccing a machine for 3D AutoCAD use.

Do we have any AutoCAD gurus in da house?

Clearly it's got to be based on a 64bit system but I'd appreciate help to avoid any 'gotchas' later. Got a spec in mind I'll post if anyone has the experience to criticize.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

With autocad it's very much CPU speed, memory and the right sort of gfx card... (they do specific ones for cad/graphical workstations)

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

Twin xeons? loads of ram and as for gfx I dunno if you really needs specialised graphics hardware nowadays? you could bung a 4850x2 in for the price of a mid range FireGL. Is this for a professionals business so it can be offset by tax?

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

I've got a mate who's a CAD technician, when she asked her IT department about this she was given all the advice that already been given, she was also advised she may be best going for a RAID setup for the HDD setup.

TBH, as Zing said, I would imagine any decent mid/high end graphics card would do the job.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

I use Rhino a lot here on 2 PC's and memory really does impact the programs more than anything..

Zing and Jon is probably right about the gfx cards... especially as modern day cards have better physic engines built into them...

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

Agreed about the memory issue. I've been observing him trying to run it on an existing workstation.

With a big 3D model you keep bumping into XP's 2Gb limit per program and there's a *lot* of disk swapping going on which slows everything to a crawl.

For that reason I'm thinking we have to start with a 64-bit system. I'm thinking a Core2 quad and possibly Quadro FX1800 graphics on a suitable mobo to carry a shed-load of ram.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

That with at least 4GB sounds like a qood place to start :tu:

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

If he'll let me splash out a bit I was thinking of a couple of Raptors in Raid0. That should get me some write speed
;)

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

you would be better with twin xeons and just standard hdds striped. The twin quad xeons would give you 60% extra ooomph over a single Q9

Is this a business solution?

What benefits are you going to get with that GFX over a 4870 in that system?besides spending an extra 250 quid?

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

Yes, it's for a business client. I've been wondering about xeons myself. A dual-cpu board may be the best way to go.

AutoCAD is tested and certified with a restricted list of graphics cards. These have drivers specifically designed to work with the program.
You have to use one from the list to get best results.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

Are the CAD drawings going to be stored locally? If so you need to look at backup solutions.

What RAID level to use is a matter of choice, If you go with RAID 0(striping) you'll get nice and fast read/write performance but no increased data integrity/protection. Capacity for this RAID level will be the sum of both drives.

If you go for a RAID 1 array(mirroring), you've got fast read performance(write is usually not enhanced that much), and good data integrity in that if one drive fails, your PC will still work with the one good drive, you can then rebuild your array when you replace the faulty drive. Capacity of a RAID 1 array is half of it's total capacity though.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

Good point Jon. My thoughts at this time are to keep the working storage local for best performance initially.

I'll probably push a backup across to the existing NAS on a schedule of some sort.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

Do you know what a typical size may be for one of the AutoCAD files, does the NAS have enough space for now/the future?

Not knowing the network topology, how many workstations etc, this may not be a issue, but has the network got enough headroom/spare bandwidth and speed to cope with the backups without causing slowdown?

Sorry, not trying to be difficult, just helping you to make sure you've got all bases covered.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

No problem Jon, you're certainly not being 'difficult' from where I'm standing. These are all things I'm adding to my checklist. And much appreciated.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

most of our cad drawings are a 200-400kb , and this is for quite detailed electrical schematics but ga layouts get much bigger. now this may differ depending if the client has any add-on packages integrated into autocad and how detailed the layout/schematics are.

i.e if i draw a control panel then i would use different layers and colour's for for various components, in the end the overall layout may end up being a meg or so and depending on how many drawings there are in a package it does start to mount.


as for hardware, i always found that plenty of memory and a good gfx card were top of the list - i do a bit at home on my pc when i don't have time and autocad runs well enough on my 8800gts, although i must admit that i don't deal with 3d work

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

It's the 3D that's the killer. He's trying to do a walk-through for his client of a shop layout. This includes car park and other exterior detail so the client can visualise walking up to the shop front and then strolling around the store. It's a monster with loads of different textures and he wants to be able to manouver it around effectively in real time.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

My workplace deals with landscape layouts and building plans, which can come out at 20mb a drawing.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

My partner is currently working with a Rhino file (comparable to an Autocad DWG file) which is 220Mb on the disk for a 6 wheel drive range-rover project.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

only slightly bigger than what i deal with, but as i said that was just an example depending on what your doing with it. the drawings the i did for a previous employer were quite large aswell - mainly due to everything being drawin independantly (including bolts etc) on different layers/colours and linetypes, so as you can imagine the detail on a 15 metre long double sided switchboard can get quite chaoticly detailed.

the company did start to look to dabble with the 3d work to demonstrate and show the equipment in situe, but i got laid off before it went anywhere.

Re: AutoCAD hardware
 

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539

infor on softmodding an 8800GTS to a Quadro

This actually looks like it works on a few cards. The hardware is the same on certain models to their Quadro counterparts. Its all simply done using rivatuner