[Closed] Gaming desktop Vs graphic design desktop?

If the product design element is CAD and specifically Solidworks there are specific graphic cards on an approved list that play nicely. Sadly these are never (as far as I'm aware) on the gamers top list of graphics cards.

My knowledge beyond that nuget is pretty minimal apart from computers seem to be be a scary price these days.

Depends what level of crunching power you need for the design aspect, more ram and cpu cores and more graphics gpu cores are better.

Not nessesarily the same thing as a high end gaming graphics card.
Hence why there is a difference in price between workstation graphics cards and gaming graphics cards.

Horses for courses really. A graphics workstation pc will be more expensive than a high end gaming pc, and probably not that reletivley great in terms of value for money for gaming on, ironically.

Although there is some crossover depending on your demands.

Can he get a mid range desktop type pc and then vpn into a college workstation or server to do the serious number crunching?

A 1k gaming rigg should be reasonably good, but not as good as a more expensive dedicated machine if he's doing 4k/3d/vr

I have a gaming laptop and use Autodesk Inventor for cad. Also gone from using showcase which is a rendering and animation package to using 3dsmax.
No issues at all with any of the software.
Laptops a few years old now and has a 1060 graphics card.

Autodesk advice is to use workstation graphics cards, but I’ve never had a problem.

The laptop is from Scan and is one of their own 3xs laptops.

Thanks folks, that's interesting.

College don't allow VPN in at the moment. I do think if he had a properly challenging task for a computer to do he will just have to go to the college.

I hear about core numbers/processors. What's the processor du jour when balancing cost and performance. AMD of some kind?

I'm suspecting that as long as a gaming graphics card doesn't exclude design work he may as well go for any half decent card.

I’m suspecting that as long as a gaming graphics card doesn’t exclude design work he may as well go for any half decent card.

Pretty much this, the gaming cards are more mainstream and if you're working with a set budget you'll get more for you money with a gaming card. Nvidia Quadro cards which we supply a lot of are horribly expensive, even a entry level P1000 will rob half your budget and performance wise they're pretty basic. Obviously you'll have to check the software's minimum spec to make sure it'll work but it usually does.

Gaming is of course a hobby so fashion plays a part, sometimes it's more cost effective to buy a old-gen, higher spec card than the latest ray tracking must have series. The GTX1060 6GB GPUs seem very good for the money now they're 'old'.

Misleading title. Was expecting worst Robot Wars ever.

Cad stuff will work on almost any potato pc. Are you sure he will be able to use the same software on his home pc? These days it tends to be quite flexible. On the other hand having a solid pc at home is always good

1. Check software licences. Is he going to be able to use the correct software at home? Does he require being able to work/edit both at college and at home? If the software is expensive and the college doesn't have a way of providing access at home, is there a free or cheaper alternative?

2. Once you know what the software is, you'll be able to get some better advice on hardware.

3. Don't forget about storage and backups. This is usually further down the list of requirements for gamers, but important for design.

this is the thread you are looking for. If he's not registered there he really should be.

I work with Autodesk Inventor which is a 3D cad package but we also use 3D studio. We had full CAD spec PC's up untill about 2 years ago when it was decided to use something more akin to a gaming graphics card as it was roughly half the price. We have had no problems really.

Dell XPS range pc
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz, 3000 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
32GB Ram
NVidia GeForce RTX2060

There's a couple of CAD programmes that run on pretty low spec machines, and are free for home use. Onshape is browser based so runs on just about anything. Fusion 360 isn't, but uses cloud storage for files. I've used both on a very low spec laptop and seem ok for fairly simple designs. Neither is as good as Solidworks (IMO) but I've used SW for the past 20 years so know how it works. But they don't cost £5k a seat or require fancy graphics cards.

I use(d) 3dsmax 2020, newest Photoshop and Lightroom and occasionally the rest of the CC suite on a PC I bought in (I think) 2015, second hand. It was pretty solid then, but not top of the line. Mid range gaming card. Everything is usable - to a point.

Video is fine in 1080, 4k I needed to run proxies or it chugged. Don't really have any problems with photo editing, though a fast SSD probably makes more difference to what I do. That said I have a project with lots of layers and effects to start tonight, so we'll see how that goes.

Max would slow down with lots of geometry, but any PC will; it just depends what you need to do with it. I'm currently using (learning) Blender which seems a fair bit more stable.

I guess the point of this rant is that any decent gaming PC should be grand!

I'd be asking the college what he'll be using and what they recommend before spending money on anything. One cannot provide an answer if one has not first defined the question.

I always take a look at which Graphics cards are on Quiet PCs list as they wont be offensive.
The Palit GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER DUAL 8GB Turing Graphics Card Looks like a sweet spot.

My current card is a Palit GeForce GTX 1050 Ti KalmX Fanless and it's been great.
(I use Adobe CC and Fusion 360 and Blender)
Never used my PC for gaming.

Cad stuff will work on almost any potato pc

Genuine question: is this a typo or is 'Potato PC' a thing?

(I don't think that it's a PC made from potatoes, obvs but sometimes jargon is weird)

I’d be asking the college what he’ll be using and what they recommend before spending money on anything.

We did on the open day. Twice.

I think they were reluctant to advise, plus were stood in the middle of a suite of amazing machines, next to a TV editing suite, next to a photography suite, next to a....well, you get the picture. The college though is Glasgow, 30 miles / an hours train and walk away.

I also have a 17 year old with cash burning a hole....

Can you email their IT department or something perhaps?

(I don’t think that it’s a PC made from potatoes, obvs but sometimes jargon is weird)

Sure, it's full of micro chips.

Potato pc meaning it will run on almost any type of pc that is mildly up to date, no graphics card or fancy cpu necessary. It’s only when you start rendering that a graphics card is necessary in my experience.

Are you sure he just doesn’t want to buy new shiny pc? Which is a good thing to have, specially since nowadays hardware is still useful 3 years later.

Genuine question: is this a typo or is ‘Potato PC’ a thing?

(I don’t think that it’s a PC made from potatoes, obvs but sometimes jargon is weird)

Potato pc meaning it will run on almost any type of pc that is mildly up to date

Wrong.

A potato PC is basically very under powered, usually ancient. It's a reference to Portal 2 when the all powerful AI is usurped and it's consciousness transferred to a potato for power causing it to run at a massively diminished capacity. It's a popular term amongst gamers for obvious reasons.

The term you would be looking for is probably 'vanilla'.

Where is he off to Matt?
My lad is in final year with a lot of CAD stuff. Can ask questions on behalf as to actual software, licence etc. He has a old Ish tower pc at home which is gaming equipped, which he logins into from afar to do overnight stuff.

Happy to help if I can,

My knowledge beyond that nuget is pretty minimal apart from computers seem to be be a scary price these days.

Having not looked recently how much is scary? I remember building a gaming machine back in the dusty annals of time and spending a lot of money.

2 32mb edo sims cost about a hundred each, the board that would take them about 150-200. My very fancy 8mb matrox mystique (Agp!) and paired orchid righteous voodoo fx 8mb (for a whopping 24mb!) cards were a few 00 each. Twin raided scsi drives were painfully pricey...

All told I think that machine cost the best part of 3k back in the 90s, it took over a year of Saturday* jobs to pay for before I discovered beer (and girls obviously, being a computer nerd was not compatible with any sort of social interaction then, even the D&D players thought I was weird)

*Saturday jobs being 8 hours sat sun and one 4hr evening a week at the lofty heights of £4ph

Matt: Might be worth speaking to your neighbour Turbo-Timmy.

He does a lot of that kinda work and both his daughters did Industrial Design at Uni.

Wow thanks @baboonz and @squirrelking - I have learned a great bit of jargon today.

@matt_outandabout - sorry for the hijack.

My very fancy 8mb matrox mystique (Agp!) and paired orchid righteous voodoo fx 8mb

I was in support in those days. That graphics card was known as the Matrox Mistake. Oft paired with an Orchid NuSound, aka Awkward NoSound, it was an absolute shit to set up properly.

I think I still have a 3DFX Voodoo card kicking about somewhere, I'm sure it'll come in handy at some point...

it was an absolute shit to set up properly.

Yeah, but it made the drop shadows on quake look t awesumz

I remember getting the sli to work took almost as long as saving up for the damn things, at least they ran solo mind so I didn't have to buy both at once.

The soundcard, I meant. It had like a hundred settings all of which were wrong when we sent them out.

* - slight exaggeration perhaps, but it felt like it.

Ah I miss when cards had 20 different jumpers you had to configure for even basic settings such as "I'd like sound but please don't make my machine fail POST"

You want sound AND the ability to use your printer?

Dogs and cats, living together.

In terms of licensing if it's Autocad stuff I'm pretty sure you can get a student account with a uni / college email address (I had one when I worked at a uni).

Cheers all.

Another question - fancy pantsy illuminated cases and yet not utterly humongous. Midi tower or can we go smaller without causing issues of fitting things in?

Rather depends what you're planning to fit in it, I suppose.

An SFF (small form factor) case will likely severely limit your options of GFX card and PSU, you probably want to avoid those.

Depends how small,

ATX is big (for a home Pc)

mATX is what you'd find in most "desktop" sized PCs

ITX is the tiny one (about 7" square).

An ITX board can still take 2 sticks of RAM and a GPU so needn't be any less powerful than a full size computer unless you need >32GB of RAM and multiple I/O cards.

What you need to watch out for if building yourself is some ITX cases only take small PSU's, and limit the length of the graphics card. Handily most graphics cards (that aren't ££££££) come in ITX sizes (usually not overclocked and only have one fan). The big compromise is usually cooling, you can't fit a mahoosive heatsink into most ITX cases, but you can fit an AIO water cooler.

If you're looking at cases, the Thermaltake Core V1 shows how you can squeeze an ITX board, full size graphics card and full size PSU into a very small case by being clever.

Re graphics cards it us s to be possible to change a Nvidia graphics card to a can workstation graphics card by flashing new firmware.

There was also a time where moving a resistor that worked as a jumper on the graphics card.

So in other words it may be possible to mod a gaming graphics card to a work station one

Worth having a look on the Dell outlet site for an XPS8930 desktop - can get a decent spec machine well within budget, especially if you can get the 10% first purchase or 15% student discount.