High-Spec build with RAID1 (hardware) - Off the Shelf

JohnCleary

Hi all,
I have been asked to source a PC for a friend for work use, mainly AutoCAD etc. (engineering practice)

As this isin't a 'job' but more advise, I want to just point them down the road of purchasing off the shelf (online) rather than build.

What i'm looking for ideally:
Xeon / i7
8+ GB RAM
Anything around 500GB HDD's are fine as all stored on NAS
Hardware RAID (1) controller
Dedicated graphics card

From a budget point of view, I have no indea. I just want to do some shopping and then point them in the right direction.


Many thanks all.

K.O.Kiki

For actual "work" computers, it's always best to find a company with a good Next-Business-Day service that covers breakdown & repair/replacement.
Reasoning being, just a few days without a working machine can cost your friend/friend's business thousands in lost potential revenue.

In Ireland, IIRC there's Dell, then HP & Elara.

minitrue

If everything is on a NAS why would they want hardware RAID? A good NVMe SSD (m.2 or full pci-e) is blisteringly quick, read speeds 3+ times that of a SATA SSD and likely quicker then any sort of array you could put together out of any number of hard disks (spinning rust). Maybe just throwing an extra normal ssd (or even hd) in there to be used to hold a clone they can restore to get back up quickly will keep them happy.

If they really want hardware raid just to avoid a rebuild in the case of a single disk failure then they should be able to get a machine with a pair of NVMe disks and use software RAID though I admit it doesn't look like Dell at least will ship their workstations with a RAID'd pair of NVMe drives out of the box (which is probably a good indicator of how far outside the box they think that is as they will give you a pair of matching NVMe drives). If RAID-1 is an absolute requirement for some reason then you might end up having to go for normal slower (and cheaper) SATA SSDs.

If budget is a problem then stick to the i7 type consumer gear, if quality (or extreme performance) is more important then price then look at the likes of Dell's Precision workstations (with workstation graphics cards, ECC and options to go to the 18 core CPUs) and wonder at how spectacularly you can customise them to cost 10s of thousands or euros When you are only looking for 500GB storage and 8GB ram (but I'd be sure to go quad channel if you have a quad channel Xeon) you probably can't sanely push it out past 5K or so though, excluding monitors

Metric Tensor

Although in theory workstation processors and graphics cards can give an edge with CAD type programs - from experience the VAST majority of engineering and architectural offices are not pushing CAD programs to that level of performance and a standard i5 or i7 with a consumer graphics card is plenty for all they'll be doing.

The one fly in the ointment is BIM type software - REVIT pushes computers fairly hard but i7 and 1070s should still be plenty unless this guy is doing real cutting edge stuff. First step is ask him if he is using REVIT or AutoCAD - that will dictate a lot of the spec.

smacl

Metric Tensor wrote: »

First step is ask him if he is using REVIT or AutoCAD - that will dictate a lot of the spec.

+1, a lot of my users are moving from AutoCAD to REVIT and using both, and some of the REVIT models are huge with big rendering overhead. For big REVIT models, AutoDesk recommends 16gb RAM, see this. If you're using RECAP with REVIT on large point clouds, I'd go for 32gb RAM.

JohnCleary

Thanks all for the informative posts.

I think you may be right about RAID... it's actually not needed as all data stored on NAS (RAID & Backed up). If I went with an SSD aswell as being faster, not as much chance of failure.

Waiting to hear back re. AutoCAD vs REVIT - Will check that and advise spec based on answer.

minitrue

An SSD would be a hard requirement in my opinion (it's only 500GB, not 5TB) with the only question being whether it's worth going to the pci-e based (m.2 or full size) or if a sata ssd is already overkill for them. If they think a raid based on spinning rust is good and want hardware RAID-1 (for whatever reason) then a raid of a pair of sata SSDs will shock them with it's speed and be more then adequate.

ED E

Drop the expenditure on the raid and buy Dell Business with next day on site. If you convert an engineers salary into an hourly rate you'll see it quickly pays for itself.

JohnCleary

Many thanks all. Turns out they're going to get someone a little more local to them help them out.

I'm off the hook :cool: