Tight budget CAD pc + laptop

[Fuzzed_out]

Right so a small bit of back story, I'm part of a formula student team (UBRacing if your interested) and we've recently been given a budget of about £1100 to spend on some new gear. The gaffa has decided I'm the PC man and she has asked me to find her a desktop pc capable of running Catia v5 with quite complex parts (space frame chassis, wheel uprights etc) but normally only 10 part assemblies or so. At this point I was thinking to myself, this sounds pretty reasonable but she always wants a monitor for it and a laptop, fortunately the laptop can literally just be a laptop as it doesn't have to run anything remarkable.

With the budget I was thinking it would boil down to something like
£350 On the laptop, £650 on the desktop and £100 on a monitor but I'm finding it god damn near impossible, laptops seem to start at £400, CADing PCs with really low end quadro cards and 4gb seem to start at £700 and that leaves me fettling a monitor out of some steel sheet and tube.

I've tried to tell her she will probably have to sacrifice one end of the bill, the good news is that even underpowered dell laptops can run the chassis model with suspension geometry and major internals but they don't do it smoothly, realistically I was thinking a 3gb i3, 4-8gb DDR3 and a low end quadro but I seem to have been too optimistic.

Any advice you guys can give me?

Cheers guys,
Alex

[cptwhite_uk]

Well here's your laptop for £300...and it's a a decent spec too...quad core, 4Gb RAM, 500Gb Hard drive, AMD Trinity APU AND Discreet GPU to boot!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-X53TK...585469&afsrc=1

You should be able to pick up a monitor for £100:

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?page=1&...terpricebands=[100+TO+199.99]&filtersubcat=3362|2362

So that's £700 for the desktop...should be doable...

[Jonj1611]

Here is a Quadro based i5 pc for £699

http://www.arbico.co.uk/Arbico-Excel...ing-PC-p-.html

[cptwhite_uk]

Do you need a CAD card - i.e. Nvidia Quadro / AMD Fire Pro/GL?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I cannot find many reviews for Catia V5 running on the CPU!

Benchmark Reviews used to run SPECviewperf 10 which included Catia V5:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...1&limitstart=5

The Phenom II CPUs seem to do well in the test and are generally better than first generation Core i7 CPUs.. However,with the latest version of the benchmark they do not Catia,so it is hard to say if SB and IB have much higher performance now due to newer extension support.

A cheap option will be a Phenom II X4 965BE or Phenom II X6 1045T:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-HDZ965FB...9591327&sr=8-1

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-p...che-95w-retail

However,you need to check how many threads Catia V5 can use(the review uses 4 threads) and whether Catia V6 works better with more threads.

If it supports more threads,I would look at the FX8120,FX8150 and Xeon E3 1230.

Also,FirePro cards are not too expensive:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-a...ort-1-x-dl-dvi

The cheaper FirePro V3900 does very well against in the more expensive Quadro 600 in Catia:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rk,3153-5.html

The FirePro does quite well in Catia too:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts...marks,138.html

The Quadro 2000 is over £300.