Good CAD spec ???

Nero

Hi, I have a mate that is studying Quantity Surveying. He is in the Market for a PC with good CAD capabilities and a budget of £1200'ish. Needless to say a powerfull graphics card is essential.

Anyone know where he could purchase?

PS - He will have nothing to do with a Dell since "they did not show respect last Friday"

po0k

I'm going to take a dive here and reccomend a nVidia card for value for money, maybe a GeForce or some kind? Or a Quadro?
There is also a way to mod a standard GeForce2 GTS to run as a Quadro2 tis on www.tomshardware.com I think. i'll look for it agin and maybe ost it.
there's also an Oxygen card but I reckon that might be a bit too pricey, but it is a pure-bred CAD card.

Jaden

What a CAD PC needs, in order of appearance.

1. Decent Card. Get a GeForce 2 Mx, expensive cards are well and good if you use Solidworks or Pro-E, or are autorouting 12 layer BGA loaded PCBs, but are overkill in most situations.

2. Decent monitor. Not just big, but half decent resolution. 17" is a minimum here, even for Autocad. Squint factor sucks.

3. Wad loads of RAM. I wouldn't run a CAD application on a machine with less than 256Megs of RAM, they're notoriously badly written, and really hog system resources. Besides, RAM is cheap.

4. A good Mouse. Optical, stop you having to de-smeg yer mouse every 4 hours.

5. Something to back up data. One day, this advice will be your best friend.


The great thing about CAD PCs is that they play games really well. Coincidence? I wonder.

po0k

heheh, unless they're college PCs running WinNT
Dunno yet what service pack they ahve,. but some lad played Quake this morning so they can't be all bad, spose they'll run CS in Software (urgh) but ona 20Meg line ( )