Building a CAD Workstation for work

[ViperXTR]

Good day all,

Planning to build a desktop for our work in the office, mostly for GIS (SpatialNET through AutoCAD).
Based from our experience for years in using the system, it uses tons of memory and it's saturating our 32GB ram on certain tasks (Huge map rendering, huge data extraction from database, intensive data querying and writing to spreadsheet so it eat tons of cpu threads specially when im querying in multiple instances)

I plan to use the newest Ryzen 9 3900X but is it good to populate all memory slots? Is 16GB stick widely available?

The system is planned to run almost 24/7

Planned specs:
Ryzen 9 3900X
64 GB DDR4 3200
X570 board (matx format), or will the X470 or B450 be adequate enough?
at least 256GB SSD (NVME preferrably)
2TB HDD (initially, we have external database storage)
GeForce GTX 1660 (AutoCAD is mostly Direct X based anyway right? COuldn't really see any real benefit in using our Quadro M2200 in AutoCAD)
600W Gold Rated PSU
2 x 1440p 24" monitors

Thanks

 

[Kingtompa]

Can only speak on AutoCAD’s behalf and i know i one thing....It loves RAM but terrible in using thread´s, have an Ryzen 2700X 32Gb Radeon VII at home and a 3 year old HP workstation Xeon E3, K2200 and 24Gb RAM so my home rigg should win on walk over, bit haven´t realy notice any differens to be honest and work with fairly complex 3D modells.

The problem with using a Geforce card is that isen´t certified and then you wan´t support they will say that you don´t run on ISV certified hardware even if the problem is nothing graphical.....so a Radeon Pro Wx 5100 or 7100 ISV certified and won´t ruin you.

/Tomas

 

[Vya Domus]

The problem is a lot of CAD software simply doesn't scale well with better hardware.

 

[ViperXTR]

Wow, i made this thread long ago,

Can only speak on AutoCAD’s behalf and i know i one thing....It loves RAM but terrible in using thread´s, have an Ryzen 2700X 32Gb Radeon VII at home and a 3 year old HP workstation Xeon E3, K2200 and 24Gb RAM so my home rigg should win on walk over, bit haven´t realy notice any differens to be honest and work with fairly complex 3D modells.

The problem with using a Geforce card is that isen´t certified and then you wan´t support they will say that you don´t run on ISV certified hardware even if the problem is nothing graphical.....so a Radeon Pro Wx 5100 or 7100 ISV certified and won´t ruin you.

/Tomas

The problem is a lot of CAD software simply doesn't scale well with better hardware.

Well if you read my initial post:

mostly for GIS (SpatialNET through AutoCAD).
Based from our experience for years in using the system, it uses tons of memory and it's saturating our 32GB ram on certain tasks (Huge map rendering, huge data extraction from database, intensive data querying and writing to spreadsheet so it eat tons of cpu threads specially when im querying in multiple instances)

Note that using AutoCAD is only part of the system, it's calling SpatialNET software as the plugin which uses oracle database for querying data and it saturates our 8 thread i7s so far on some cases.

As for GeForce card certification, not sure if it would matter that match, for support i guess, could not really see much difference between our QUadro M2200 vs the other laptops with GTX 1050 cards

 

[Kingtompa]

Ok, if the plugin can do the heavy liftning and use all cores and threads and well inplanted with AutoCAD then you are in luck......”FATAL ERROR” have a tendency to pop-up at the must crucial moments.

But as said AutoCAD don´t scale well with new hardware and OS......cant´t realy say that ACAD run as god on Win 10 as it did on Win 7 and Win XP

Haha....saw the date of your initial post, so did you buy the computer ?

Wow, i made this thread long ago,

 

[ViperXTR]

Ok, if the plugin can do the heavy liftning and use all cores and threads and well inplanted with AutoCAD then you are in luck......”FATAL ERROR” have a tendency to pop-up at the must crucial moments.

But as said AutoCAD don´t scale well with new hardware and OS......cant´t realy say that ACAD run as god on Win 10 as it did on Win 7 and Win XP

Haha....saw the date of your initial post, so did you buy the computer ?

I'm aware that AutoCAD doesn't scale much, its the SPatialNET that is making it work hard, after working with spatialnet and autocad for years, the fatal error that occurs are pretty limited to some data extractions (which can be mitigated by launching spatialnet desktop, no autocad for extraction) and certain scenarios/drawings which is pretty rare.

The purchase order is still for approval i think, but normally our new machines arrive after the new year

 

[killster1]

970 evo 250gb for 99$ is a rip off. personally been buying 920ex hp 1tb drives for 107$, everything else looks OK i guess.. Oh Super old thread sorry.

 

[jayjr1105]

I thought true AutoCAD craves quadro vs geforce?

 

[Kingtompa]

It craves Direct X and RAM and anything with More than 4 Cores are pretty much a waste..........