Powerful computer

[Hawiian Cadder]

I have almost no lag on my current computer which is 6 gigs of ram, core2duo 2.16, Nvidia 9800gtx. As far as I can tell, the GPU doesn't make a whole lot of difference unless you have one designed specifically for CAD. I would say that you need lots of fast ram, and a good Front side bus speed to work with CAD. if you are going to be doing a lot of animations or renders, then the CPU needs to be beefier.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Hawiian Cadder

I have almost no lag on my current computer which is 6 gigs of ram, core2duo 2.16, Nvidia 9800gtx. As far as I can tell, the GPU doesn't make a whole lot of difference unless you have one designed specifically for CAD. I would say that you need lots of fast ram, and a good Front side bus speed to work with CAD. if you are going to be doing a lot of animations or renders, then the CPU needs to be beefier.

GPU's are often overlooked when making a decent CAD computer. I'd take a mediocre cpu/mobo/ram and nice gpu over the inverse.

Also, most geforces can be softmodded to quadros. Done it for a few of the team computers.

[waialua359]

Adam,
whenever you're ready to move to Hawaii, let me know.
Help us out and I'll get you all the equipment you want!

[Micah Chetrit]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

GPU's are often overlooked when making a decent CAD computer. I'd take a mediocre cpu/mobo/ram and nice gpu over the inverse.

Also, most geforces can be softmodded to quadros. Done it for a few of the team computers.

Adam, how do you softmod a GeForce into a Quadro? I personally have ATI so I can't test it yet, but we are looking into an upgrade or two so it would be real useful if you could give me a tutorial.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Micah Chetrit

Adam, how do you softmod a GeForce into a Quadro? I personally have ATI so I can't test it yet, but we are looking into an upgrade or two so it would be real useful if you could give me a tutorial.

There are lots of good guides you can google. The key thing is to figure out which quadro your geforce equates to. If it doesn't have an equivalent, I believe you're out of luck and can't mod it. It's interesting to see the difference in price between them.

[Trent B]

Granted softmodded quadros have less VRAM than the actual quadros but half the difference is the software.

I wanna say 8800GT, 8800GTS and 260GTX's are pretty common to softmod and all older and thus cheaper.

[sanddrag]

I haven't done any heavy CAD modeling on my new build yet, but in general I've been very happy with my Core i5 2500K overclocked to 3.8 GHz. I have DDR3 1866 RAM. With this combo and a good hard drive you hardly have to wait for much of anything. It is still usable even under 100% load on Prime95. Add solid state caching or a dedicated solid state drive and you'd really be flying. Additionally, the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 is not that bad really for being integrated. I run dual monitors and so far even with HD video on one and Inventor on the other (no giant assemblies yet) it seems to work alright. Whether or not it still would for an entire FRC robot remains to be seen. I purposely went this route on my new system, with a Z68 motherboard to save cost and avoid purchasing a video card until I determine I need it. So far I have not. You would probably be fine with a CPU from AMD at about half the cost, but I wanted to have close to the best available CPU at the time for the budget I set. There are often a lot of great deals on AMD processors and/or motherboard combos.

One other thing to consider is having the OS and programs on one hard drive, and all files and storage on another. This will avoid the hard drive read/write speed bottleneck when moving large volumes of files.

[daniel_dsouza]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

One other thing to consider is having the OS and programs on one hard drive, and all files and storage on another. This will avoid the hard drive read/write speed bottleneck when moving large volumes of files.

If I had two drives, one for programs and OS and one for file storage, would I have to set the separation in the OS? If so, how would I do so?

About getting video cards, there was a booth at the 2011 Arizona regional giving out NVIDIA graphics cards, one per team. I believe that we got a GTX 480. If you decide that you don't want to use an Intel graphics system, or can wait, then look for the booth next regional.

[mesamb1]

Originally Posted by daniel_dsouza

If I had two drives, one for programs and OS and one for file storage, would I have to set the separation in the OS? If so, how would I do so?

The simplest way to do it is to just select the hard drive you want for your OS and install your OS. Then install a second hard drive later.
I have to imagine there is a fancier way to do this, but when you install the OS it will create its folders on that drive and the OS doesnt want to move any of those.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

There are lots of good guides you can google. The key thing is to figure out which quadro your geforce equates to. If it doesn't have an equivalent, I believe you're out of luck and can't mod it. It's interesting to see the difference in price between them.

Adam, do you have any advice on specific models to softmod?

[Trent B]

It seems to be typically done with Rivatuner,

When I was looking to see if it was feasible for my card I noticed this site came up a lot http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539

[buildmaster5000]

I built a machine that has:

• i7-960 at 3.2 Ghz
• 8GB of DDR3 1600 ram
• average, not frills hard drives (one 500GB for programs/OS and a 2TB RAID 1 for file storage)
• GTX 480 graphics (total overkill, but the team gave it to me....)
• 1000W power supply

I will honestly say I have not really used CAD software on it, but I have streamed video and played online games at the same time with no problems at all. Honestly, I would bet that any quad core processor over 3Ghz will serve you fine if the rest of the machine is built roughly to the same standards (read: don't skimp on the rest of the components a good processor will be key). Also, prices have dropped so much it gets easier every week to build a machine.

[AdamHeard]

Glenn, Hawaii sounds like a great option, still have to finish school first though! What happens after that is still up in the air.

Originally Posted by scottydoh

Again, it all depends on what you're using the computer for. Outside of my FIRST involvement, I'm an architecture student, and a majority of my work is done in Autodesk Revit Architecture. And when it comes to renderings (the most resource hogging) Revit (and the render engine Mental Ray) could care less about my GPU, all it wants is CPU power.

With that being said, the System requirements pretty much covers it. Get a good CPU, memory is cheap these days, so get as much as you can, and a decent GPU and you'll be fine for most "FIRST scale" models.

That's not really a fair argument, as rendering is a completely different process and isn't affected by the computer's ability to push pixels to the screen. A slow GPU can make even a very high end computer a pain to CAD on as it's constantly struggling to keep up with you rotating, zooming in, etc...

[Nemo]

You can get the most bang for your buck by getting the most powerful CAD specific graphics card in your price range and a healthy amount of RAM. Spending extra on the processor will probably provide less performance per dollar.

This summer I put together a computer specifically to work on Inventor models at home and have been very happy with it. I was looking for good value, and this is the meat of what I ended up buying:

ATI FirePro V4800 ($160)
AMD Phenom II x4 965 3.4 GHz ($130)
BIOSTAR A870U3 motherboard ($65)
8 Gb RAM (G Skill model F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL) ($55)

I have been very pleased with the build. It has no problems with robot assemblies with hundreds of parts, and its frame rate is really nice with smaller stuff. It is also at least decent while running the most complex assemblies I've created or the ones you can download courtesy of teams 148/228/973/etc. It doesn't run those larger assemblies at a sick frame rate or anything, but I'm also not waiting around for it to zoom or rotate (or restart from a crash) like I was on my old computer.

The processor could have been any number of other chips - I picked this one because I liked the performance vs price. I thought about spending twice as much on a Core i5, but now I'm glad I didn't. It is important to note that Inventor makes very little use of multiple processors, although I suppose that could change in future versions. And I like having spreadsheets and browsers open while I play with Inventor.

When you research video cards for Inventor, you will quickly identify the ATI FirePro line and the nVidia Quadro line. There is a price jump from $160 to $400 in each company's product line, ignoring older models. Both of the $160 cards can handle my most complex models pretty nicely.

If you are interested in a pre-built computer, you will want to be careful. You will pay a little extra for the convenience of having HP build it, of course. A bunch of workstation builds have weirdly chosen components, with unimpressive graphics card on the low end and pointlessly expensive processors on the high end. Our school just bought a handful of HP workstations with Core i5 processors, 4 GB RAM, and Quadro 600, and that particular workstation is about the most balanced build I can find if you want a decent amount of power for under $1000. I opened up a complicated robot assembly on one of them, and it ran nicely. I don't know the model number of that workstation, but you can search it up for something like $700-800. HP doesn't sell any low-mid models with 8 gigs of ram, but you can get the extra 4 GB for $30 if desired.

Happy shopping!

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by scottydoh

How is that unfair? I clearly stated that I was doing something very different from the example you stated.

My response was based on the fact that he asked about inventor, presumably for conventional CAD design and not rendering.