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ULTIMATE CAD MACHINE
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Saul View Drop Down
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    Posted: 09 February 2010 at 7:29pm
like bassmish made a really good PC for music production, and since i'm going to be doing lots of CAD in the coming years, i thought i should ask you chaps who are knowledgable in PC building to suggest some ideas. 

Let me say first of all, i hate PCs. LOL

but AutoCAD does not run on OSx. 

im weighing up buying a desktop mac which will cost me in the region of £800 once i have specced it up, and had my discounts etc - i can then run boot camp on it. this will be great as i'll be able to use it for my everyday stuff too, but then i do already have a mac - which incidently i also use boot camp on to run CAD, but cad on a laptop can become very tiresome and uncomfortable after a few hours 

so the other option is build something specifically for AutoCAD - with a MEGA graphics card, and really good display, and lots of RAM and processor power. 

i have no interest in using it for any other purpose, (not even internet). apart from maybe Hornresponse and winISD, but theyre hardly significant. 


whats the options? - i thought i should find out, just to see what money could be saved, but it would have to be quite a saving.... 



Edited by Saul - 09 February 2010 at 7:38pm
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bassmish View Drop Down
Young Croc
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cha!
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Saul View Drop Down
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Points: 5912 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Saul Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 09 February 2010 at 8:02pm
ah i see, so how much is one of these "cha"s and where can i buy one?

Edited by Saul - 09 February 2010 at 8:03pm
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bassmish View Drop Down
Young Croc
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I'll sell you my dub machine for 800 squid if you want!

save you the bother :)

P.S. Desktops are so much nicer than laptops in my opinion for being on it for a while. much more comfortable like you say when you're spending ages on it.
so good plan!

surely it won't actually cost 800 to get something to handle that?! That's loads man. Mine ended up costing 450ish. but I'm using a doggy poo screen (cos I didn't buy/need one) and don't have a graphics card and didn't buy a soundcard. But the graphics card I was gonna buy was only about 40 and it apparently could easily handle the monitor I wanted which like 1900 by 1400 or something.
but they were PC tings.
I know nothing (and don't ever want to!!!!) about macs.

(The only annoying thing I've found is that for some reason my fan on the power supply is kind of noisy. not sure why cos it's not drawing that much I don't think. I think it's something in the case tho that's rattling cos it's a well old case/tower/dubmachine house)
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bassmish View Drop Down
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Points: 1333 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote bassmish Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 09 February 2010 at 8:17pm
Originally posted by bassmish bassmish wrote:



P.S. Desktops are so much nicer than laptops in my opinion for being on it for a while. much more comfortable like you say when you're spending ages on it.


this is my new opinion formed in the last month. I'm very pleased I built one instead of buying a laptop. and it's nice to know what's inside it.
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Saul View Drop Down
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well to put it into perspective on a mac i would get the following: 

8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x2GB
3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
500GB Serial ATA Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
21 inch screen. 
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Saul View Drop Down
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Points: 5912 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Saul Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 09 February 2010 at 8:23pm
Originally posted by bassmish bassmish wrote:

Originally posted by bassmish bassmish wrote:



P.S. Desktops are so much nicer than laptops in my opinion for being on it for a while. much more comfortable like you say when you're spending ages on it.


this is my new opinion formed in the last month. I'm very pleased I built one instead of buying a laptop. and it's nice to know what's inside it.

well i agree. 

this is why i am tempted to get a desktop mac for music production also. 


Edited by Saul - 09 February 2010 at 8:26pm
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Sheggy View Drop Down
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Originally posted by Saul Saul wrote:



this is why i am tempted to get a desktop mac for music production also. 


Clap Do it!
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eltron View Drop Down
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If you're more comfortable using a mac i don't see the point in getting/building a whole new pc just for autoCAD. Running something like win xp pro through vmware instead of bootcamp/parallels might be a good option too, it seems to integrate win-based programs far better into the OSX-environment.

I've been using autoCAD (everything from 2004 to 2008LT & ADT/Architecture + a bit of Rhino and ArchiCAD) for about 8 years now, but made the switch from PC to MAC recently, and am still a bit astray.

In my experience basic 2D drafting isn't that demanding on hardware. Handling large drawings (maps etc.) starts to get sticky when you have a couple of km2 on your screen, just because of the sheer amount of information.

In 3D it depends much on what mode you want to use. If you're going to be spinning large models in textured/shaded mode it will be putting strain on your graphics card. OpenGL-support is a plus.

People feel free to correct me if i'm wrong!
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shagnasty View Drop Down
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Points: 7685 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote shagnasty Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 February 2010 at 12:02am
Truth is Autocad is very well coded and if you aren't throwing about a model of the Space shuttle in full 3d you would probably get it to run in paralelz on a decent Mac.
 
Ultimate CAD machine???
 
I just bought this for a customer:-
 
Supermicro X8DAi board
dual QUAD-core HT xeon @ 3.3Ghz (that 16 cpus!!)
18Gb of ECC DDR3 ram (you need a gig of ram per core to run XP)
Quadro FX3800 Graphs card
dual 128Gb SSDs in raid 0 boot stripe
15Krpm SAS drive for data
box, 1KW PSU, DVD-RAM drive and Win XP 64
 
Cool £6270 well spent...
 
Throws 3Ds max models around like text documents....
 
My Home PC runs a single AMD x4 945 with 4Gb (I only run xp-32 so no point in more ram) and a radeon X1950 with 2 64Gb SSD in a hardware raid0 stripe and it throws around models well but can't touch the dual Xeon rig for rendering (54sec on Super micro, 2mins 12 on mine) but my machine cost me £650 so I figure I have good BHP/£ advantage...
 
If you really hate PCs and have an Intel Mac Bootcamp may be a plan, prob is a lot of macs use 2.5" drives which cripple them.
 
Give it a spin and if works you have the best of both worlds a gorgeous looking PC that can do OS X as well.
 
I run OS X on my box (or have the option too) for R & D use but *personally* think it is a useless joke, but that is based on using it in an Active directory enviroiment where it SUCKS.
 
As a stand alone OS it may suit most users, the total lack of security shocked me, but if you get on with it better than WinDOZE I would try and keep with it.
 
Despite what people tell you Macs need Ram so i would load-up some memory and bootcamp. Yes the Mac graphs cards are doggy pooe by PC standards but OS X does use them amazingly well and they will povide enough BHP for most CAD apps under XP.
 
Please post how this goes, I hav gained a pile of winging Mac users on a site and my whilst they slowly starting to understand XP works better for some things I would like to use the big Macs to run it on so they can have both...
 
 
Smile
 
S
 
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Saul View Drop Down
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Points: 5912 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Saul Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 February 2010 at 8:13am
suprisingly i dont have £6270 to spend. 

and being a member of a website like this, i don't think a computer would be my first interest if i did have that muchWink

ok, the situation is i already have a fairly powerful (well, by standards 1-2 years ago) macbook pro. I already run bootcamp. It's a 4gb ram, 2.4ghz intel core duo jobby, and its seems to deal with CAD ok. But as i say laptops and long working times don't mix. And it sometimes can be a little slow when doing huge 3d stuff, but that's to be expected. (even the PCs in the CAD studios are bad).  

So my inquiry was really to work out how much a half decent machine for graphics was going to cost me. Or whether i should buy a mac for £800-900 odd, or even save up twice that amount and buy a mac tower. 


Edited by Saul - 10 February 2010 at 8:15am
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NiPZ View Drop Down
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Points: 267 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote NiPZ Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10 February 2010 at 4:30pm
Save up and get a Mac Pro! Your not far off atm! Would be well worth the wait IMO

But what I was thinking is that why don't you just build a Hackint0sh?
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