£600 Spec for CAD and 3D use

Hi guys,

I'm in need of your valuable advice again if you don't mind. I want to build my dad a pc for him to use while I'm still on holiday for a budget of £600 with a monitor preferably minimum 22" if you can squeeze in a decent 24" even better (as I know prices for them will eat into budget a lot).

I would like to stick to Intel but am open to AMD suggestions. Operating system doesn't need to be worried about as I own the retail version of vista. I would like the machine to have a minimum of 4gb RAM, 8gb would be ideal (got both x86 and x64 of vista).

Case something nice and easy to work with nothing flash or tacky I want this to last a good while for him. I'm thinking along the lines of a Q6600 or another type of quad? Main use will be an AutoCAD workstation and rendering in 3DS MAX. Keyboard and mouse not too worried about as he can use my old logitech set, but costing that in would be welcomed.

He's been using an aging PII 450 for god knows how many years so I'm thinking if I do him a good spec now it'll do him justice for like another 5 or 6 years lol

Thanks in advance for your comments!

You'll be hard pressed to get a decent (i.e. Non-TN panel) monitor for cheap, so nothing under £300.

I would suggest you start with this:
http://hotukdeals.com/item/299010/hp...uad-server-2-/

Then get 2x2GB of ram (very cheap), and optionally get a graphics card for it.

I don't know how 3D intensive is 3DS Max. I've used stuff like Pro/Engineer and Abaqus for my course, and they worked fine even on my laptop with integrated graphics, so you may not even need a graphics card.

I built this recently

Antec P180 Mini ~£58
Enermax 425W Modu82+ ~£50
Phenom 9950 125W + Scythe Ninja II ~£165
4GB Crucial Ballistix ~£36 (gone up now)
Asus M3A78-CM ~£50
640GB WD AAKS~£47
LG Blu Ray ~£65 (Normal Optical would be ~£15 obviously)

So with normal optical that would be around £420

I've seen these a lot cheaper but you could add that too it
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/23-De...inema-Quality-!!

If the 3D work is intensive though you would want to rethink the whole thing probably. While the onboard graphics on that board are strong they are no replacement for a decent dedicated card.

The phenom has an unlocked multiplier so overclocking is very easy and it will happily hit 3.0GHz.

Supposedly there is a softmod which will turn an HD3850 into the equivalent fireGL card:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=245236

You could get an HD3850 for around 65 quid:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139628

Thanks for the points will have a looksee!

Only the latest versions of Autocad will work with Vista X64 & you'll need the x64 specific version. Still works better in XP tbh.
Q6600 and a workstation grade GPU.