The wide range of usages make your goal difficu;lt to satisfy ... some workstation class apps do better with Quadro and some only on Quadro ... others excel on GTX, in either case, CUDA should be on ya must have list. Most AutoDesk products have little to no multi-thread capability outside of rendering.
1. "For AutoCAD 2000 and later, releases do have some support for dual processors and hyperthreading, but no more than two cores will be utilized. On dual-core processor systems, you will see significant increases in AutoCAD application performance, particularly for graphics and file I/O operations. If you are using AutoCAD on a multi-processor system (i.e., more than two cores), you may see a slight performance improvement, but only as much as the operating system is taking advantage of the multiple processors."
2. "Although certain features in 3ds Max are multi-threaded (such as rendering), not all of the program's features can be coded to work quickly and reliably using multi-threading (dividing tasks among multiple logical processors or CPU cores.) Users who upgrade their computer systems from a single 4-core Intel CPU to dual Xeon 4-core processors (with similar clock speeds) may see a nearly 200 percent speed increase in final rendering, but they won't necessarily see concomitant speed increases in all other parts of the program -- such as their viewport display, for example. Even parts of the program that are multi-threaded will not see an absolutely linear speed increase if a user goes from a 4-core CPU to an 8-core CPU. Finally, hyper-threading simply splits up tasks among existing processor cores -- the digital equivalent of cutting a fixed-size pizza into 8 smaller slices instead of 4 large ones. Each core or additional thread requires its own memory allocation to perform well, so in some cases hyper-threading doesn't actually speed up a program's performance overall, but can actually detract from it."
3. Solidworks "One thing we want to make sure is very clear is that the majority of tasks (including creating/editing/rotating/viewing models) in Solidworks are single-threaded so there is no performance gain by having a higher core count CPU. Rendering is really the one place in Solidworks where a higher core count CPU (or multiple physical CPUs) would actually show a significant improvement in performance. For a single CPU, the efficiency is pretty much perfect with a ~100% multi core efficiency. The efficiency did drop when using multiple physical CPUs (down to about 95.5%), but that is somewhat to be expected given the overhead associated with multiple CPUs. " An 8-core Xeon will cut rendering time down to about 60-70% as compared with an i7.
4. Maya - "This is a single-threaded task within Maya. Unlike rendering, which is highly multi-threaded, the process of building up your meshes, extruding polygons and manipulating vertices only uses one CPU core. If you primarily use 3ds Max for modeling, then don’t waste money on a dual CPU Maya workstation with dozens of CPU cores – because those extra CPU cores won’t help you."
As for GFX, you can see how the varios GFX cards from a few years back handled the various programs. Do a web search on "14 Workstations Tomshardware" for a 2013 article on this topic... prolly a newer one somewhere ... I had this one bookmarked but forum won't let me paste in link.
The wide range of usages make your goal difficu;lt to satisfy ... some workstation class apps do better with Quadro and some only on Quadro ... others excel on GTX, in either case, CUDA should be on ya must have list. Most AutoDesk products have little to no multi-thread capability outside of rendering.
1. "For AutoCAD 2000 and later, releases do have some support for dual processors and hyperthreading, but no more than two cores will be utilized. On dual-core processor systems, you will see significant increases in AutoCAD application performance, particularly for graphics and file I/O operations. If you are using AutoCAD on a multi-processor system (i.e., more than two cores), you may see a slight performance improvement, but only as much as the operating system is taking advantage of the multiple processors."
2. "Although certain features in 3ds Max are multi-threaded (such as rendering), not all of the program's features can be coded to work quickly and reliably using multi-threading (dividing tasks among multiple logical processors or CPU cores.) Users who upgrade their computer systems from a single 4-core Intel CPU to dual Xeon 4-core processors (with similar clock speeds) may see a nearly 200 percent speed increase in final rendering, but they won't necessarily see concomitant speed increases in all other parts of the program -- such as their viewport display, for example. Even parts of the program that are multi-threaded will not see an absolutely linear speed increase if a user goes from a 4-core CPU to an 8-core CPU. Finally, hyper-threading simply splits up tasks among existing processor cores -- the digital equivalent of cutting a fixed-size pizza into 8 smaller slices instead of 4 large ones. Each core or additional thread requires its own memory allocation to perform well, so in some cases hyper-threading doesn't actually speed up a program's performance overall, but can actually detract from it."
3. Solidworks "One thing we want to make sure is very clear is that the majority of tasks (including creating/editing/rotating/viewing models) in Solidworks are single-threaded so there is no performance gain by having a higher core count CPU. Rendering is really the one place in Solidworks where a higher core count CPU (or multiple physical CPUs) would actually show a significant improvement in performance. For a single CPU, the efficiency is pretty much perfect with a ~100% multi core efficiency. The efficiency did drop when using multiple physical CPUs (down to about 95.5%), but that is somewhat to be expected given the overhead associated with multiple CPUs. " An 8-core Xeon will cut rendering time down to about 60-70% as compared with an i7.
4. Maya - "This is a single-threaded task within Maya. Unlike rendering, which is highly multi-threaded, the process of building up your meshes, extruding polygons and manipulating vertices only uses one CPU core. If you primarily use 3ds Max for modeling, then don’t waste money on a dual CPU Maya workstation with dozens of CPU cores – because those extra CPU cores won’t help you."
As for GFX, you can see how the varios GFX cards from a few years back handled the various programs. Do a web search on "14 Workstations Tomshardware" for a 2013 article on this topic... prolly a newer one somewhere ... I had this one bookmarked but forum won't let me paste in link. I opened my engineering consulting office in the early and we have been building CAD workstations since that time for our own use and others, we use GTX cards exclusively as our usage is limited to 2d and 3d AutoCAD. Most others that we work with who do rendering have a dedicated quadro workstation for this task.
Solidworks hasn't and as of now AFAIK isn't supported on GTX cards. For the other apps, rendering is usually better on Quadro ... 2D / 3 D design on GTX,
As for what / where to buy, we have all our laptops for field engineers custom build to our component list by Clevo distributors. We use LPC Digital but I notice that with current generation models, they don't have a Quadro option. If other distributors have followed suit, and you need the Quadro, then I'd recommend MSI as they are the only laptop vendor that actually builds laptops as opposed to any brand you'd recognize; they all buy from OEMs.
https://www.msi.com/Workstations/
And yes no less than 16 GB ... 32 GB if rendering.