Need comp upgrade for CAD 2001

[Byte]

My friend needs to upgrade his comp for CAD. What would be the best bang for buck? He currently has Athlon 1GHz, Matrox 450, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, 80GB Hard Drive.

 

[Mday]

CAD huh...

how much money does he want to spend?

the cheapest option would be more RAM.

a more substantial option would be a new motherboard that does DDR, perhaps an nforce2, and use dual channel. the nforce2 boards should still be able to use his old athlon.

the next step above that would be a new CPU as well. followed by a new video card or HDD.

summary, order of significance

1. more RAM
2. new mobo with DDR + more ram
3. new CPU
4. new HDD
5. new video card

the HDD is an interesting option. if he goes all the way, i recommed getting the asus a7n8x deluxe and getting a WD raptor along with it.

 

[Duvie]

Probably a Barton 2500+, 512mb to 1gb of pc2700 (in 2 stick for both) or greater DDR.....oh and some Nforce2 DCDDR mobo....

I built a couple 1600+ to 1800+ xp system with 512mb of ddr and they flat out blew away the athlon 950 we had in the office with the 256mb of pc133....the drives were 40gb ata133 7200rpm drives versus older ata66 7200rpm stuff....

Maybe even a 2100+xp would be fine but CADD will take advantage of the memory and the bandwidth....

I run CADD 2002i platform with LDD version 3 in winxp......At the lower end if you want to avoid the spendy high end p4's nothing compares to the amd line and cadd performance...

 

[Byte]

Does hyperthreading help CAD at all? Also exactly what kind of video cards would help? Most ppl feel Matrox is as good as it gets for 2D. He also says that things get aliased when going too high of resolution (though you would think the opposite)