I need help picking out a workstation CPU. It's for an architect grad. He uses CAD and other programs of that nature. I can get a full program list if that will help.
My choices were this:
3930k - 6 cores which I assume all of the programs he uses are heavily multithreaded from the reading I've done.
4770k - Cheap option since you can usually pick it up at Microcenter for real cheap. Also uses a cheaper board.
Now his local shop picked out the Ivybridge-E Quadcore. Is there any reason you'd really want that? I assume Overclocking, but in that case you could get a 3770k and hit similar levels right? What are the benefits of the 4820k? More PCIe lanes? Quad channel memory(Would this help in the programs he is using though?)
Any help would be great thanks!
This question is right up my alley as I'm a CAD / BIM Manager for a large architectural firm that uses Revit / AutoCAD / 3Ds Max. The short answer is: get all the horsepower you can afford.
The different programs have different requirement. Revit and CAD are
primarily single threaded and want clock speed. An overclocked 4770K will outperform a stock 6 core IB-E Extreme CPU in most tasks. Contrary to common wisdom, these two programs DO NOT require a super high powered graphics card in a typical production environment. Unless you're doing a lot of rendering in Revit with textures and lighting, a moderate graphics card is plenty. Nvidia Quadro is preferred but not necessary (better drivers).
The game changes when you start doing renderings in Revit/ 3Ds Max / Rhino. Rendering can use as many cores as you can throw at it. Super high quality renderings can still take hours even on top hardware, so if you're doing a lot of this then 6+ cores will be wanted. This work does required better graphics cards to maintain decent frame rates in real time previews. You'll want something like a Quadro K4000 or better ($700-800) if you do LOTS of rendering. I've never tried a Geforce series card in this software so I can't comment on its performance.
As for the rest, 16GB of RAM should be sufficient unless working on ginormous models (like 200,000 square foot office facilities). You will want an SSD for sure as Revit files can get very large. And if you're spending this kind of cash there is no reason not to with today's prices.
My company's current hardware for our power users is the Boxx 4920 Extreme workstation. These have overclocked 6-core Sandy Bridge Extreme processors at 4.5ghz, 32GB RAM, Quadro 4000 vid cards, 240gb Intel 520 SSD. They were the best compromise of single threaded performance for Revit and multi-core rendering performance. These workstations were our first experience with overclocked systems, and while they are blazing fast the reliability has been less than stellar. Every component in these stations is cream of the crop when they were configured. We've had quite a few issues related to the overclocking, and several are at Boxx for warranty work as I type this (we have about 40 stations). We've had more of them go down in the first 6 months of ownership than we had with our previous HP workstations in their entire lifecycle.
