What's your CAD setup?

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by NickE

You probably don't need a crazy computer for FRC CAD. Our team's CAD models are likely larger than average and plenty of the computers at our lab with older processors and less than 2GB of RAM handle them fine. A nice graphics card, however, can make all the difference. A nice Quadro card can make an okay machine scream for CAD.

Search around on eBay for old workstations. You can get a great machine for a great price. We have at least one of these in our lab and it's great. Searching "workstation quadro" would probably be a good start. Listings change frequently so if you don't see what you want, look back soon. You can likely get a couple decent machines for sub $300 each.

Hmm this is true, I did not consider that it would be used for just CAD

I have a Pentium 4 sitting around that I can still run Solidworks on pretty well. I guess it just depends what settings you want to run your software at.

$800 is definitely quite a lot for 1 machine if it is solely running CAD software.