drawwhat? Posted July 28, 2007 Share Posted July 28, 2007 hi,, I know you can't endorse or recommend or sell or anything like that ,, but I am collecting data ? If I were to get a new Dell, (it is going to be a Dell) ,, how would it compare to yours ??? or however you need to phrase that .??? :-}> thanks so much for you input. Danny Quote Link to comment
David Bertrand Posted July 29, 2007 Share Posted July 29, 2007 The first thing I would do is talk to Dell about it. They probably sell regularly to CAD users and can recommend a system to you. Then talk to a local PC builder and see how the specs compare. Quote Link to comment
cbaarch Posted July 30, 2007 Share Posted July 30, 2007 you are probably looking for specs of the CPU Intel Dual Core min 3 gHz winxp will only uses 3.5 gig of RAM - 2 should be enough unless you do a lot of rendering then 4 gigs or 2 x 2 gig paired RAM video card that will handle 2 monitors using DVI connectors with min 512K RAM hard drive has large as you can afford winxp pro instead of Vista if you have existing peripherals DVD read/write and 2 monitors: 17" are good deals and gives you good screen space. the above did a rendering in about 3 hours. instead of 6 hours on a single core 3.0ghz - 2 megs of RAM hope this helps Quote Link to comment
drawwhat? Posted July 30, 2007 Author Share Posted July 30, 2007 thanks David & cb,, it helped,, and I'm narrowing it down,, funny how 800 turns into 2800 in no time.. ;-}> Quote Link to comment
Hugo Posted August 1, 2007 Share Posted August 1, 2007 I think it all depends on what are you going to do. I work in an architecture and design firm, and we design restaurants, cafes, houses and offices and also exhibits and some furniture. We are mostly Macintosh based, but we also have some Windows PCs. None of the computers is a beast, and we can do our work fast enough. Right now I am using a 17" iMac and and for some personal projects I use my MacBook, sometimes with its own screen and others attached to a 17" LCD external screen. Of course one could think on an eight core Mac Pro or the equivalent Windows machine, but I think you really do not need to spend so much money. Unless you have it, and you plan to work on very big projects, with lots of 3D rendering and animations. For small projects, I think almost any current machine will do the work. I have 2 Gb of RAM and it makes a difference with computers with 1 Gb. Also, dual core processors make Renderworks work significantly faster. But for my not so complex modeling purposes, even the 64 Mb video chip of the MacBook has been enough. It is nice to have dual screens and a very powerful computer but it is important to know that Vectorworks does not need such an expensive machine to run fine. That are my two cents. Hope it helps. Hugo Quote Link to comment
drawwhat? Posted August 1, 2007 Author Share Posted August 1, 2007 Thanks,, all good advice,, we chose this to start with- I did get the Dell Precision 390 and added or modified as 2.4 GHz 1066 4MB 2GB 667 Ram split nVidia Quadro 256 160 GB @ 3 Gb/s 20 ultra sharp flatscreen.. I thought the wide screen would squash the page too much? just doing a lot of 2d with other apps open and online music playing not rendering much,, so I'll probably never see the ultimate potential of all this .. thanks all Danny Quote Link to comment
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