Prefab or Homebuild Workstations for Revit (3D Rendering) Use

[orty]

My brother is studying architecture and is getting into using Revit. My parents told him they'd give him some money for Christmas to buy him a computer so he doesn't have to keep trudging to the computer lab in the snow.

I don't know a thing about Revit, but have installed an educational copy on my laptop here so my brother can use it in the meanwhile (until he goes back to school). I've been tasked with building or buying him a computer, and since he lives a couple day's drive from here, I'm debating whether I should build one or buy a workstation from the likes of HP or what not.

I know back in the day you could get away with OpenGL rendering on gaming cards, but that appears to not be the case any more (as enabling OpenGL support in Revit on my laptop, which has a 8700M GT card in it, actually slowed down the render). Am I correct in that assumption? My parents have basically budgeted $1500 for this, and while I know I'm going to need AT LEAST a dual-core CPU (preferably quad core), and throw a bunch of RAM at it (likely 4GB), the video card question is one that confuses me, as I don't know a thing about workstation-class video cards. What kinds of cards out there provide the best bang for the buck?

Is paying more for a better CPU going to help more than a rendering Video card, or will OpenGL really help him with renders? Will even a low-end OpenGL card help?

Is $1500 a reasonable budget (would need everything, including monitor) or am I losing my mind? This station would be used strictly for Revit work, as he has an older MacBook that he uses for everything else already.

Secondly, since he lives remotely, I'm debating whether I should build him one (which I could probably do cheaper) or buy him a pre-built one from HP or something and just ship it over there? He's not a computer wizard, so having somebody other than me he could call if there are problems or he needs help would be terrific. Anybody have any input on workstation providers?

Does anybody use Revit with Vista 64 bit? It's listed as supported on Revit's site, but under the "Recommended" area, it lists XP 64 and not Vista 64.

Any input would be great!

-orty

 

[heyheybooboo]

I do believe that FireGL drivers have an Autodesk Revit application specific profile and application accelerators - you need to do a little checking on that as I'm not a Revit guy ...

Now, if you head over to the Guru3D forums (or google 'Radeon softmod FireGL') you will find simple instructions and scripts for creating a FireGl workstation card out of a Radeon video card - in your case maybe an HD 3850 (1Gb ?!?!) to a FireGL V7700.

I don't think a quad will help your bro unless he uses Revit with 3dSM. I would imagine that Revit runs in a 32-bit emulation under a 64-bit OS but could suck up a good bit of ram depending upon configuration and the size files. Loading up on RAM will speed multitasking and handle OS background services while your bro pounds away on Revit.

I've been looking at an Asus M3A78-T. The primary reason is that Asus specs ECC support and includes some ECC RAM in their QVL list - I was looking at 8Gb (4x2Gb) of Kingston DDR2 667MHz for less than $100.

IIRC there was some Elpida ECC DDR2 800MHz that was qualified but it was only 1Gb sticks.

Use the 74Gb Raptor for your OS/Apps drive and a WD 640Gb for storage. I was thinkin' about an X2 4850e but you might want to look at the X2 7750.

There's a $50 rebate with Vista Ultimate 64-bit and the M3A78-T. That should leave you with around $750 for your case, PSU, DVD & LCD - you could even throw in an eSATA drive for back-ups and still save a little money on your budget.

It's hard to find a reasonably-priced s775 mobo with ECC support - check out the Gigabyte GA-X48-DS5 for an Intel solution - pop in an e7300 (or maybe an e8400). Email Gigabyte when you select your RAMs on the ECC support - IIRC they didn't seem to have an ECC designation on their QVL list.

I think some nForce chipsets also provided ECC support so you may want to look at some of those ....

 

[orty]

Revit does have a 64-bit version in Revit 2009, but I'll be danged if I can find it on the student downloads on AutoDesk's site, so I don't know if its available to students. Which would be silly, but not surprising.

He doesn't use Revit for 3DStudioMax, so I think we'll be OK there, but the rendering engine in Revit did peg both my cores on my laptop at 100%, so it must be multi-threaded.

Thanks for the tip on the FireGL. I knew there were some of these kinds of things floating around for a while, didn't know if there still were.

Do you think ECC would be an absolute requirement or no? Non-ECC is so much cheaper, and Revit makes so many auto save backups when it's working.

I think I have a nice Antec power supply plus an extra DVD drive, if I decide to build myself, so that'll save a few bucks.

Thanks for the tips! Anybody else?

 

[Denithor]

http://www.revitcity.com/forum...thread&thread_id=13182

Found that looking around a bit, seems to indicate just more cpu power & ram are most important for revit. I would suggest Vista 64 with a Q9550 and 8GB DDR2 (or you could go the i7 920 route).

Softmod G80 8800GTS to Quadro FX4600

You are also supposed to be able to fairly easily softmod a 3870 into a FireGL V7700 but I have yet to find a good guide for that modification.

 

[orty]

Another thought to throw into the mix (and thanks for everybody's comments -- I think that building is going to be better bang for the buck):
http://archin3d.blogspot.com/2...benchmark-results.html

Those compare the 32-versus-64 bit speed in Revit. Wish I could get ahold of student version of Revit in 64 bit (will get an email into Autodesk).

 

[wwswimming]

these days, a cheap office computer would qualify as a fantastic workstation, 2 years ago.

there's considerable benefit in building your own workstation - when you need to upgrade
or fix something, you're in the driver's seat, as opposed to depending on somebody else.

i suggest buying him an HP with 4 GB RAM and a dual core and a PCI-E connector that
will allow an upgrade to a video card with stable drivers - e.g. the Sapphire 3870.

these days, you could probably pick that up for $500.

from another thread, about laptops -

"Best Buy had a Toshiba with a 17" monitor, the Athlon 64X2 TL60 CPU,
3 GB RAM & 250 GB HDD, model #L355D-S7825 ==>$549

also an HP G 60 235Dx with a 16" monitor, 3 GB/ 320 GB, the T4200
dual core Intel CPU, + a webcam ==> $499 !!!"

 

[imagoon]

Revit needs RAM and typically one of the recommended cards on the autodesk website to run the best. You can often force the card to work but here that caused more issues that it was worth. 32-bit Revit also wont install on 64-bit OS without "hacking" the msi file to remove the OS check.