CAD / 3D Build for £600 Inc Monitor

[dbh]

Hi

I was hoping you guys could help me again. I need to spec a pc for my dad who is going from a PII 450 (yes you read right a Pentium 2). He wants the pc solely for CAD and 3D work but also wants a nice decent sized monitor to do the job.

What can you guys recommend??

£600 is the max budget with everything delivered. If you can work stuff down even cheaper that would be great.

Thanks in advance!

[staffsMike]

Does he want an amazing monitor and a not so good PC?

An amazing PC and not so good monitor?

Or somewhere inbetween?

I'd be inclined to spend about £350 - £400 on the PC and £200 - £250 on the monitor.

Something along the lines of

Abit AMD 780G mobo ~ £45
AMD X2 4850e ~£45
4GB PC6400 RAM ~£55
Antec NSK 3480 with 380W Earthwatts ~£55
640GB Western digial AAKS ~£50
Samsung Optical ~£15
Scythe Mine ~£25 (nice and quiet cooling)

Not sure on the graphics card. Something along the lines of an 8800GT ~£90 or the 9800GTX ~£115 with the latter the total is about £395.

So £200 on a very nice 22" or a cheapy 24".

There is the very cheap Q6600 route as well. You might need to sarfice RAM and the motherboard quality though, as well as dropping graphics maybe.

[Agent]

What programs will he be using?
You'd build the PC totally different if its for something like 3DMax compared to say, the Unreal engine

[TAKTAK]

mebbe a starting point HERE

as i'm guessing that it would be 3D rendering in which case i think the quad would be better suited, and mebbe get a better mobo and aftermarket cooler for a bit of an O/C....
possibly get rid of the case and PSU and get something good.....

chuck a GFX card in with that ~£100 leaving ~£250 for a decent monitor

[staffsMike]

I personally wouldn't go any lower than the Antec combo above for case and PSU. The coolermaster combo which is £3 cheaper on ebay .. maybe.

You could try the E7200 dual core route and overclock I suppose.

Antec combo £55
Q6600 ~ £110
2GB PC6400 ~£30
8800GT~ £90
320GB AAKS ~£35
optical ~£15
G31 mobo ~£35

£370 so far.

Maybe push for a G33 ~£55

leaving £210 for a nice 22".

[Agent]

The reason I asked about the programs is shown by the 2 replies above.
Both are recomending cards around the £100 range. If this system only uses something like 3DMax and isn't going to be used for gaming, a £30 card will suffice

[staffsMike]

Well my initial build uses the 780G board so that you could leave the dedicated gfx card out altogether for that very reason

[dbh]

Hey guys thanks for the quick responses. My dad doesn't game at all infact I've never seen him play a computer game at all maybe minesweeper if anything yep that bad lol anyways. It will solely be used as a workstation, and the occasional film. So I'm guessing anything than can handle a 3DS MAX viewport pretty well would be good, as AutoCAD lines can't be as taxing as a MAX scene. In terms of monitor he's already got a 21" CRT but I think I owe it to my dad to put in a nice flatscreen for him. A 21" CRT is just tooo big. Aren't nvidia cards normally good for CAD / MAX stuff, or has ATI caught up? In terms of 3D rendering maybe the quad would be good, but again its still a sizeable amount of the budget.

[Zhaoman]

Most important thing is does he render in 3DS Max? If he does then a £600 build would not have enough grunt, requiring overnight renders (depending on quality etc...). I'd recommend a quad core, along with lots and lots of RAM as a minimum starting point if he intends to render.

Personally, if I were doing this build, I'd stick with staffsMike's second build, but have 4Gb of RAM as a minimum and swap out the 8800GT for a cheaper professional solution with a larger memory. In fact I'd be tempted to stick in 8Gb as Max is such a huge memory hogger.

If he doesn't render then a budget build would be sufficient, such as the first suggestion, with no need for discrete graphics. This would keep the cost way down too!

[dbh]

Which workstation graphics card would you recommend then for around the price range of the 8800GT i'm not sure there are any comparable options? unless they can be modded to quadro but afaik nvidia put a stop to that?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You can mod HD3850/HD3870 cards to their equivalent FireGL models!

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=251765

[richieuk]

A 22" Neovo for £135 from scan is plenty good enough, bearing in mind this will be HUGE to an old PII user (They were pretty much stuck at 17" back then) *scratch that, just re-read above post)

So £465 for the build? A cheap mobo should do, as no powerhousing will be rquired, but a Quad core should be essential for CAD and 3D as its able to use the cores. Cheap case, with the standard stock fan should be adequate. 4GB of RAM would certainly help for modelling and therefor 64bit vista, if the budget stretches.

You should think about budgeting as follows:

PSU £50 (Could can get a basic one from a trusted brand that'll do the trick as it wont be under much strain)
CASE £10 (Again, basic as needed)
MOBO £40 (Basic again, something with PCI-Ex 16x, and support s775 65nm cores with built in sound, SATA and DDR2 ram support)
RAM £55 for 4GB, £30 for 2GB, your choice. (Buy corsair for quality here)
CPU £115 (or if you want just a dual core, knock £20 off, look for Q6600)
HD £30 (320GB should be overkill, get single platter though)
GFX £80 (Dont break the bank if its not essential, can easily be upgraded later, nVidia8600 or ati3850)
OS £65 (not alot you can do here )
MONITOR £135 (22" Neovo from SCAN, big, beautiful and the spec of a high end for a budget price)
DVD £15 (last piece to the puzzle, easy to find)


That should hit budget nicely, and do what you need it too. For specific

[Noxvayl]

ATI cards have always been better at CAD and 3DMAX rendering even while they were not so good for 3D graphics games. They did very well for rendering because they have always had the faster calculating core measured in flops. Right now the HD4850 is 1teraFLOP while the GTX280 is only 800GigaFLOPS so for a rendering situation the HD4850 is far better but for gaming the GTX280 is better.

I'd push to get the HD4850 over any other GFX in the £100 region as the price certainly warrants the gains you get in raw calculating performance. I'd also emulate what Zhaoman suggested and get a quad core with 4gb memory minimum.

Something like this:
Gigabyte GA-P35-S3G - £49.23
Intel Q6600 - £116.90
Gigabyte HD4850 - £118.66(not in stock but due today so hopefully they arrived)
4Gb Corsair XMS2 PC6400 800MHZ - £54.57
250Gb Seagate Barracuda - £31.36
LiteOn 20x DVD -+ RW - £15.39
Antec Sonata 3 - £82.12
20" Viewsonic VA2016w - £134.17

Total: £602.40(remember you get free delivery from Scan so this is the final price you have to pay for the PC, then just put it together)

I doubt you'll get much better than that tbh. You could save save getting a different Antec Case+PSU combo for cheaper but I wouldn't choose any other components

[Agent]

Most important thing is does he render in 3DS Max? If he does then a £600 build would not have enough grunt, requiring overnight renders (depending on quality etc...). I'd recommend a quad core, along with lots and lots of RAM as a minimum starting point if he intends to render.

Not enough grunt? I guess that depends on what he's rendering
A £600 machine can make a very good machine for 3DMax use - certainly with the Quad and plenty of memory as you said, which would fit within budget by the looks of it

ATI cards have always been better at CAD and 3DMAX rendering even while they were not so good for 3D graphics games. They did very well for rendering because they have always had the faster calculating core measured in flops. Right now the HD4850 is 1teraFLOP while the GTX280 is only 800GigaFLOPS so for a rendering situation the HD4850 is far better but for gaming the GTX280 is better.

Its no where near as simple as looking at the FLOPS of each card - That is over simplified to the point of being wrong. It depends on many other factors, primarily the amount of RAM the card has on board and the current cards OpenGL performance (You do realise that nVidia has generally had better OpenGL support, right? ). That will have a larger influence on viewport/OpenGL speeds on larger scenes in most cases (I do assume you mean viewports and not rendering here )

[Noxvayl]

Not enough grunt? I guess that depends on what he's rendering
A £600 machine can make a very good machine for 3DMax use - certainly with the Quad and plenty of memory as you said, which would fit within budget by the looks of it



Its no where near as simple as looking at the FLOPS of each card - That is over simplified to the point of being wrong. It depends on many other factors, primarily the amount of RAM the card has on board and the current cards OpenGL performance (You do realise that nVidia has generally had better OpenGL support, right? ). That will have a larger influence on viewport/OpenGL speeds on larger scenes in most cases (I do assume you mean viewports and not rendering here )

Yeah I know that much I just couldn't be asked to go into the more in depth reasoning(its late you know ). ATI's architecture design is better suited to CAD and 3DMAX than the current nVidia GPU's and has been for quite a while. One of the performance results that reflects the difference in architecture very well is the FLOPS of each card. It may not be a direct result from CAD/3dMAX viewpoints but as it stands the figures do correlate with the current generation performance in CAD/3dMAX situations so I used them to explain it in layman's terms.

Apologies for seeming misleading, I do sometimes speak in riddles and late at night is definitely one of those times...

[Agent]

ATI's architecture design is better suited to CAD and 3DMAX than the current nVidia GPU's and has been for quite a while. One of the performance results that reflects the difference in architecture very well is the FLOPS of each card. It may not be a direct result from CAD/3dMAX viewpoints but as it stands the figures do correlate with the current generation performance in CAD/3dMAX situations so I used them to explain it in layman's terms.

Apologies for seeming misleading, I do sometimes speak in riddles and late at night is definitely one of those times...

Nope, sorry I disagree, can you back this up please?

What is architecturally better about the ATI cards? At the start of the year nVidia had the lead in most situations with their QuadroFX 5600 (over ATi's FireGL V8650). I know this as we had both at work....and then we brought 10 of the Quadros. Granted, the Quadro was much more expensive, but that has nothing to do with the architecture that you mention. Benchmarks here should you need them.

What we can say is that the overall trend as a whole is that NVIDIA has a faster product with the QuadroFX 5600. Outside of Viewperf and Maya, the QuadroFX 5600 won all the rest of the benchmarks.

The mid range is a little more different - last time I checked ATi had the lead there, but it wasn't huge. Here are some benchmarks backing that up too.

I just can't see how "ATI's architecture design is better suited" to CAD and 3DMax. Even when looking over recent benchmarks for the cards (which exclude a nice jump in performance we saw mid way through the year with new drivers from nVidia), its still give and take here and there, from both companies.

As for "and has been for quite a while"....Even if we look at the FX 4600 (late 2007) (1):

When the results from our benchmark testing were in, the Quadro FX 4600 outperformed the FireGL V7300 across the board, but, in general, the difference in mean scores was typically less than 10 percent. It’s important to keep in mind that benchmark tests are simulations and may not always mirror real-world models. Instead of putting the graphics cards through additional benchmarks, we opted for more practical testing, such as loading very heavy datasets into 3ds Max 9. After working with various OpenGL and Direct3D settings for view port display, hardware lighting, texture display and rendering, there was often little or no difference in performance.

If thats not far enough back - what about the FX 5500 from 2006? (which is older than the FX4600, despite numbering - its G71 based) from (2)

Summing up, I wouldn’t give any specific recommendations about purchasing this or that professional product. These solutions are quite expensive and you should address this matter responsibly. Especially, since professional users are very rarely working in several different applications at the same time. Therefore, your choice of a workstation graphics card will be strictly determined by the type of applications you will be running on your platform. Of course, Nvidia Quadro FX solutions are faster in most cases than ATI FireGL, however there are tasks where FireGL will be irreplaceable. For example, in Maya. So, we encourage those of you who have read this article to the end to make your own conclusions basing on the results and analysis we have shared with you today.

And this is without even taking into the advancements that CUDA will probably bring.


Would like to hear your opinion on why ATi has a better suited architecture