PC - for Cad - what do you have ?

[drawwhat?]

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

[David Bertrand]

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.

[cbaarch]

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

[drawwhat?]

thanks David & cb,, it helped,, and I'm narrowing it down,, funny how 800 turns into 2800 in no time.. ;-}>

[Hugo]

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

[drawwhat?]

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