CAD workstation

[robbiehall]

Can anyone advise what processor and gfx card would be suitable for Rhinoceros 4.0, Flamingo, Illustrator CS3 and Photoshop? Oh, and Office at the same time.
I have been asked to look at a Dell Precision 690 with the Intel Quad Core Xeon E5345 and nVidia Quadro FX 4600 768MB.

Cheers
Rob

[0iD]

We run HPxw4400 workstations with e6600 & q6600, 4gb ram & quadro FX 1500's running Pro Engineer, Autocad Mechanical 2007, Inventor 12, 3DS max & office.

Perfectly capable.

[robbiehall]

What is going to be the limiting factor? Is it just the RAM, or does the gfx card make all the difference?

Cheers
Rob

[ed^chigliak]

I can see how quad core is good for the rendering but I don't really see any need for a high end workstation GPU in rhino. Realtime shading is OpenGL and any half decent gaming GPU would be fine. 8800GTS 320mb or 640mb is the way to go since Nvidia have the better OpenGL drivers and they are value for money.

Quadro is overpriced and I very much doubt you need it. It probably just does the realtime anti-alias which in my opinion makes CAD lines look worse. I changed from a gaming GPU to a workstation ATI fireGL 2yrs ago and honestly - I just wasted money.

I used Rhino2 on Geforce3 cards with OpenGL acceleration enabled and it was fine to model in detail some medical components and instruments.

[ed^chigliak]

Rhino forums used to be quite active. They would be your best source of advice regarding hardware. My gut feeling is any old Quad rig + half decent gamers GPU will do just fine.

[alsenior]

i would recommend that you go for a proper workstation card anyway. the isv certified drivers can make a difference and nvidia can always squige a little more performance out of the drivers as well

[0iD]

Some apps are even picky about driver versions. Autodesk Inventor being one of the worst offenders. And CAD can be memory hungry too, especially if you're working on a big model.

As with all things though, it's all about personal preference. I mean, my home rig runs ACAD, ProE, Catia, Solid works fine, and it's predominantly a gaming rig, my work CAD station runs Doom3 & CoD2 fine.