Topic: Civil3D - CAD Performance Specs

[MSTG007]

I am looking with our IT department about computer upgrade systems with Civil3D. I wanted to get your thoughts on these two systems and what you think would be better.

Thinkstation P310 Xeon E3-1240V5 3.5 GHZ
8 GB RAM
256 GB SSD
Quadro K620


or

Thinkstation P300 Xeon E3-1241V3 3.5 GHZ
16 GB RAM
1 TB Harddrive
Quadro K620

Thanks for any feedback!

[Rob...]

You will thank yourself by going with the SSD. Upgrading the RAM would be a consideration with that machine.

[Mark]

I'm going with the Thinkstation P300. I would rather have more ram and a spinning disk.

[mjfarrell]

second hard drive....and dedicate your swap file there...make it HUGE!

[cadtag]

Speccing a Xeon is pretty much throwing money straight down the toilet for CAD,  since there's very limited use of all the cores and features in that processor.  Running a multi-user database a Xeon is excellent.  For CAD/C3D?  nope.  And the ECC Ram Xeons require is more expensive, and not beneficial in CAD.

See the recent Ars Technica article on Intel processors for a good discussion on the modesl/features and identifiers.

And seriously -- look at Boxx and compare their offerings to Lenovo.  At least the folk at Boxx and Xi know how to spell CAD

[ronjonp]

Definitely make your primary drive an SSD.

[Mark]

And seriously -- look at Boxx and compare their offerings to Lenovo.  At least the folk at Boxx and Xi know how to spell CAD

Cool, never heard of them. They are not inexpensive machines though. You pay for that overclocked i-7. Wow!

[ronjonp]

Is this really the price for the processor?

[mjfarrell]

@ newegg



Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP 3.0 GHz LGA 2011 130W BX80635E52690V2 Server Processor Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP 3.0 GHz 25MB L3 Cache LGA 2011 130W BX80635E52690V2 Server Processor
$2,064.99

[ronjonp]

@ newegg



Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP 3.0 GHz LGA 2011 130W BX80635E52690V2 Server Processor Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP 3.0 GHz 25MB L3 Cache LGA 2011 130W BX80635E52690V2 Server Processor
$2,064.99

Dang ... my whole computer did not cost that much!
The I-7 seems like a no brainer.

[MSTG007]

Wow... That's a lot.

[mjfarrell]

Wow... That's a lot.

It is also a LOT of waste until autodesk makes all their products capable of using multiple core processors, and or multiple processors.

[Rob...]

Here we go again...

[mjfarrell]

Here we go again...

really were you going?

[mjfarrell]

Here we go again...

statement of FACTS is a problem for you?


https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Support-for-multi-core-processors-with-AutoCAD.html

Due to the lack of multi-threading, AutoCAD is not capable of using more than 50% of the CPU on a dual-core computer, so there is no significant performance gain over a single CPU computer except for the areas noted above.