As above. I can spec. virtually everything, with the exception of processors, which I know little about.

Any suggestions?

We’re using i7-4790K

Whatever that is. That’ll run civ3d at full chat so revit shouldnt be a problem

I run an i5 machine that’s nowt special but I don’t tend to output any renderings of high quality so don’t really notice any dip in performance.

I specced a Revit workstation for a client recent. I spoke with someone at Autodesk and they couldn’t really help – they say “the best you can afford” Min was 4th gen i3 dual core up to some monster 10 core Xeon. They let you decide how complex you think your models are and spec accordingly.

I seem to recall we settled on one of the 6 core i7s and a near top of the range Quadro GPU, which was in hindsight over-kill. Client are architects who work mostly on schools and shopping centres.

Cool, thanks. Our IT company have recommended an 8 core Xeon, but that really jacks the price up to over £2700.

If you have to render out then weight threads over clockspeed. If you always work in a viewport then weight clockspeed over threads. Cinebanch single- and multi-threaded numbers are a good way to choose CPUs for CAD.

4 Core and Hyperthreading as a minimum, SSD and 32GB of RAM would be good.

Protips:

8 physical cores and 20MB of cache for <£100?! Xeon 2670’s go on ebay for peanuts. You can slap them in a dual CPU build too 😀

6 cores for overclockers – 4.2-4.6GHz : X79 Xeon E5-1650 fully unlocked and cheap 😀

You want one of THESE mate.

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/computer-cpu-buying-advice#post-8109772

Schweet.

Those Xeon’s in Takisawa2’s suggestion would crunch some good numbers, though the singlethreaded will be well behind a modern machine….unless you OC. 5675’s are good for about 4.2-4.4GHz, probably not on that motherboard though :/

I suppose the problem here is whether your business will let you purchase used machines/parts…

I suppose the problem here is whether your business will let you purchase used machines/parts…

If this is a machine that personal income relies upon I always recommend buying a properly built system with a rock-solid on-site warranty. You can easily loose 2-4 days of productivity if something goes wrong and you have to troubleshoot, source and fit replacement parts yourself.

Depending on how important it is using Xeon, ECC Memory and redundant hard drives might also be worth paying for – although the reliability of consumer parts is now much better than 10 years ago with greatly reduced failure rates.

If all that makes sense have a look at Scan.co.uk or Novatech.co.uk; you should be able to talk to someone in the UK and I’d expect you’d get better value and customisation from either of them than buying HP/Dell/Lenovo.

In all honesty, I’m not going to risk the company’s money on second-hand parts. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Interesting, Autodesk only requires Shader Model 5.0 and Direct X 11 compatibility for graphics. A more detailed recommendation sheet listed a an Nvidia Quadro M4000 display adaptor.

The in-built GPU/Display adaptor of the latest Intel i5/i7/Xeon E3 CPU’s exceeds that.

IMO you’d probably be fine with an i7-6700 which gives 4 cores and 8 logical processors. It would easily perform as well as a 6-core Xeon CPU from 5 years ago and use a lot less power to do it. It would also not need an additional graphics card. The equivalent Xeon would be the E3-1245 v5, very similar but with support for workstation motherboards and unbuffered ECC memory.

If you can find one the slightly older Broadwell based Xeon E3-1285 v4 also has on-board eDRAM to boost graphics performance further.