What's your CAD setup?

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by agartner01

I know our sponsors say they pay over a $1000 dollars for theirs, so I thought my price range of $500 to $800 would be borderline at best. Isn't CAD the main reason you spend so much? I know I tried installing both solidworks and creo on my teammates i3 computer, and it couldn't handle even simple solids... I will take a look at what nickE said. I just don't want to by something, then have it not work.

With a formatted drive and a fresh install of Windows, you should be able to run SW on low settings. Most likely, other programs and such were eating up your friends' resources. This is the other reason why building your own PC is fun - no useless junk software.

I personally would still build with an i5, 8gigs of RAM, and a good graphics card. These are computers you want to last you a while and your team will probably do other things on them as well. Your sponsors most likely just buy from a retailer instead of building their own. Nick's suggestion is correct that you want a good graphics card if you are going bare minimum on the other components. I would stick to purchasing more up to date parts though so I wouldn't need to upgrade or worry for a long while.

[sanddrag]

$600 to $800 is plenty these days, so long as you aren't modeling every screw thread and always working with a rendered model with material and lighting styles.

Don't feel like you have to rush right out and buy a super expensive graphics card. Autodesk Inventor is certified on Intel HD3000 graphics and often performs rather nicely on the second-gen Core i_ chips with the on-die Intel HD3000 graphics, even with full robot assemblies.

My home setup built in July of 2011 - I had less than $800 into it at the time.
Antec One Hundred Case
500W power supply
Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 Motherboard
Intel Core i5 2500K Overclocked to 4.0 GHz
Hyper TX3 cooler
Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB 32mb cache hard drive
Crucial 60 gig SSD caching drive.
G-Skill DDR3-1866 RAM, 8 Gigs
Running onboard graphics on the motherboard - no graphics card. Autodesk Inventor runs great, even while watching HD video on a second monitor through the onboard graphics.

My previous mobile unit was a Fujitsu LH531 Core i5 2510m with 8 gigs of RAM. Again, Autodesk Inventor worked just fine, even with full robot assemblies. In Inventor 2012, there was a minor issue with the graphics driver though on this machine.

My current mobile unit is an i7 Macbook Pro, currently with only 4 gigs of RAM, running Windows 7 x64 of course. Haven't done too much CAD work on it so far, but it seems to run Inventor 2013 just fine. Call me nuts, but honestly I liked the 14" Fujitsu better. The Macbook keyboard and trackpad annoys me.

At school, we have a few different systems, all running Windows 7 x64 of course.
-We have some small form factor HP machines with Core i5 2500 processors and 4 gigs of RAM, onboard graphics.
-We have some mid-tower HP Core 2 Quads with 8 gigs of DDR3 1333 RAM and ATI FirePro V3800 cards running 2 monitors
-We have some mid-tower HP i5 2500 machines with 6 gigs of DDR3 1333 RAM and ATI FirePro V3800 cards running 2 monitors
- And finally, one mid-tower HP i5 2500 machine with 6 gigs of DDR3 1333 RAM and ATI FirePro V4800 card running 3 displays at 1920x1080.

All systems run Autodesk Inventor just fine for most purposes. We generally avoid working on the full robot assembly on the small form factor machines with only 4 gigs of RAM. There is just a little bit of lag when working with the full robot assembly on the V3800 cards. The V4800 card is a significant step up, with noticably faster performance on big detailed models. It can work with a full robot CAD model fluidly while playing HD video on two other displays. Neither of these are anywhere close to the best cards out there, but we had to outfit a total of 13 machines, and it's what we could afford at the time, and it suits are needs fine, except for the fact that I hate ATI Catalyst software (it does work though).

Really, if budget is a concern, I'd say you'd even be fine on a second-gen i3, so long as it was one of the better i3 processors with the HD3000 graphics. General CAD work, 4 gigs of RAM. Full robot assembly, 8 gigs. In terms of number of cores, it's only going to matter if you're animating and/or rendering. For most CAD design work, you're only running one thread on one core anyhow, so a dual core processor is fine.

One thing to keep in mind is that there's differences between gaming-oriented and "workstation"-oriented graphics cards. For CAD work, you want a "workstation" card and something that has been tested and certified with the CAD program you'll be using. Don't just assume that any card with good specs or reviews will be a good choice for CAD.