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I work for a small/medium sized hvac controls company. We currently have 10 people engineering for us using Autocad 2016. All the engineers are using Dell workstations with I7’s, 8GB’s of RAM, and Radeon HD 7570’s. These PC’s are more than powerful enough to do what they need to do in Autocad(our engineering drawings are pretty basic, with no fancy 3D stuff or animations). We are actually way under utilizing Autocad’s full capabilities. With our control systems, we do have web gui’s and ways of displaying graphics to end users. These graphics are sometimes lightly animated and are pretty basic, we have recently hired a graphics designer(starting in a few weeks) to help us make these graphics more pretty/fancy.

Our engineering manager just forwarded me an email from this new guy with his request/specs for a new PC, and to me it’s seems like super overkill. The hard drives, monitors, and RAM, I have no issue with; my biggest concern is the video card and the processor. Everyone in our engineering department is perfectly fine with $1500 machines, so a $6200 machine just seems crazy to me. I would love to get some opinions from the community on this(especially from another graphics designer). Here is the email I received :

The following hardware is all certified via Autodesk and the 3DS Max software. I went to the Dell website and was able to build the machine based on the following. There are many other options when configuring the workstation such as services and support that may best be decided by your IT person.

HARDWARE: Dell Precision Tower 7910 (Workstation) ~$6,234.50

DPU: Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2650 v3 (10C, 2.3GHz, Turbo, HT, 25M, 105W)

OS: Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit, English

GPU: NVIDIA Quadro K5200 8GB (2 DP, 2 DL-DVI-I) (2 DP to SL-DVI adapter)

RAM: 32GB (4x8GB) 2133MHz DDR4 RDIMM ECC

Hard Drive Config: C3 SATA / SSD 2.5 Inch, 1-2 Hard Drives

First Hard Drive: 512GB 2.5" Serial-ATA Solid State Drive (For OS and Software)

Second Hard Drive: 512GB 2.5" Serial-ATA Solid State Drive (For Data)

(*) Dell U2913WM 29" (landscape) $599.00

Dell U2312HM 23" $849.00

SOFTWARE:

Autodesk 3DS Max 2016 -$3,675.00 (last year for perpetual licensing. Will be cloud based in future)

Adobe Creative Suite (Design Standard) -$1,299.00

Hopes this starts to narrow things down. I went bold on the 10 Core processor and the Nvidia GPU based on the performance of the machine I put together a couple years ago and it’s performance. Of course in both cases, there’s room to go even more powerful but I feel this is a good compromise with all things considered. In my case I was able to save a few dollars by building my own machine from varying manufacturers, however, that comes with some risks.

Buying the Dell pre-configured machine gets you a lot more support if trouble arises and a lot less headaches in the event of a component failure.

@Dell_Technologies @Adobe

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You’re paying for the Precision line. Dell considers those ‘Workstations’ and hence the price is set accordingly. Granted, the hardware is overall a little more ‘beefy’ (to use a technical term), but that’s the difference between $1500 and $6000. You can get basically the same video card, processor, RAM etc. in a lessor ‘desktop’ line, like the Optiplex for a lot less.

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3ds Max is a pain in the wallet. You call 3.6k US$ expensive? It used to be nearly 1.5k US$ more a few years ago…

And then you haven’t considered any plugins you need to do your job better then with the standard buggy Max.

As long as you don’t render too complicated stuff you can do it with a lower spec machine. Its when you render with textures & lightning and evt dust particles included that it gets heavy. I don’t suppose you work for Pixar are you?

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It sounds more like someone shopping for a system that they don’t have to pay for (Duh). I suspect the guy has no clue what he “needs” and Dell is more than willing to provide what he “wants”.

See if you can’t take an old machine and put it in a new box with a Dell Logo on it - I’ll bet he’ll be happy with that.

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Windows 7 on a Xeon? To me that feels strange.

For Autocad I presume that your experience will tell you enough. May be the 3DS software will be a performance killer.

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Dear God man…

My wife is a graphic designer. Yeah she has an upgraded Mac, but nothing to this level. What is he going to do with 10 processor cores? Does he think he is building a server? With that graphics card I’m beginning to think he is planning on some serious gaming…

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On another note, Where is his data going to live? if its on the SSD what backup plan is there for it? Creatives are often their own worst enemy when it comes to this.

Will his content be significantly different to the other designers? If you talk to the engineering manager and identify what his role is it might be that this guy is just asking for the moon because he can when he will be doing the same role/output as the other engineers.

As someone who has done video/graphics workflows before, I think he is just asking for top of the line to see if he gets it but really I’d want to find out what exactly he will be doing. and how much he will be expected to do.

I would reconsider the spec he NEEDS versus the spec he WANTS.

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I am surprised they didn’t ask for a Mac, as most of the people I know in this field use them. But at my last company, all of our “Cad” people had dual Xeon Cad stations with an boat load of RAM and dual hard drives using Dell’s built in RAID with a RAID 1 setup. They cost quite a bit. But the work they did would always pay for it in the end.

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I tend to try and keep systems fairly standard and not allow much deviation. I’ve found from experience that as soon as one person gets a much better/more expensive/different brand piece of hardware the anatomy measuring starts and everyone thinks they need to one up that person. If you buy a $6300 machine for this person are you prepared to do so for everyone else?

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Also Windows 7 in this day and age? For a new, seems more or less standalone, system win 8.1 or even 10.

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Insansiest of all is the K5200. We are putting them into our CAD detailer boxes. They’re doing 3D piping and HVAC drafting, and ZGPU shows they’re only utilizing 10-20% of the GPU and video memory. There’s no way a graphic designer needs that kind of card, and they’re $1,800. Even a K200 would do the job, and they’re under $500. I would quote everything they want on paper, and compare it to a more moderate $1,000-$1,200 box that would still be overkill. Provide it to the execs in charge and ask them if they think a graphic designer needs a computer 4x more expensive than what your CAD detailers have. It’s their money, but it’s not the first time a hot shot gets hired at a job and demands (literally demands) specific equipment that their peers do not have, because they are special. The company obviously wanted them, and this is what they need to work with, or they’ll go elsewhere. We had a CAD detailer like that start recently. Demanded 2x 27" monitors (they get one), a wireless GAMING mouse, a laptop that stays at his cube in addition to his desktop, and plenty more. We made his wallpaper Barbie by policy until he chilled out.

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Impressive spec but as mentioned seems like he’s shopping for the best/what he wants.

This would be good for someone hammering 3DS Max, the way you worded “we have recently hired a graphics designer(starting in a few weeks) to help us make these graphics more pretty/fancy.” doesn’t suggest they’ll be using it to the max potential & instead just working on it.

Tone down the CPU to a good i7, GPU is important.

On a side note would your other engineers not get annoyed if they found out new guy’s screens alone cost more than their machines?

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I’m with the rest of the crew here.

Proc and GPU are WAY overkill.

There comes a point where things just take time to render/process, and the human need to be patient.

You could build nearly the strength of system by hand, with consumer side parts, for almost 1/4 less.

A GTX970 would be more than sufficient for him, and anything past 4 cores (/w HT) you will hit limitations of the the Win 7 OS.

Tell him a big fat NO.

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uhh… yeah. that is way overkill. I have a degree in graphic design (I do graphics and IT work) and I’m a gamer. that is definitely a waste of money.

$850 for 23" monitor?

8GB K5200? is this guy doing some serious 3D animations or heavy video production and effects or something?

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If i could ask for what i wanted, i would but that doesn’t mean i’ll get it… Worst that could happen is management says no and get a different one.

Definitely overkill though.

If your going to dream, dream big.

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First of all, this person has a hobby, like some sort of aircraft flight or whatever. This is what he intends to use this piece of art for, but pretend that he needs this for work.

Consider also that whatever is produced/rendered on this system may not be viewed by the intended target audience. Even if the graphics can be viewed, it will be slow to present on a typical computer. Guess what? When customers experience slow screen graphics, they close the page and move on … to a competitor’s site.

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Yes that is insane to ask for that machine. I have servers in production that didn’t cost that and have less CPU.

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Have you never asked for more than what you knew you would get? lol…

Time to let him know what he will receive instead…?

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EDIT: Just re-read post. Yeah for hardware it does seem a bit overkill.

The video card does seem to be a overkill BUT it really depends on what he will be doing and how much multi-tasking he does among graphic editing (things work much nicer editing multiple graphics at once when you have higher video RAM).

Also I would think it is ultimately up to the owners/managers if they are OK with it. You can mention it seems like overkill but last thing you want is to under spec a PC and have it come back and bite you in the butt because the designer “isn’t able to do their job with the hardware you provided”.

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I must be one of the crazy ones. We spend $10K+ for graphics design workstations. Then we work them into the dirt they came from.

When it comes to designing a graphics design workstation, you are getting what you pay for. If you want to keep the costs as low as possible, look at the software needed, and base you purchase on what hardware the vendor certifies. You need to consider support. If you don’t have a certified configuration, you don’t have support.

You can go with the minimum if you want, but realize that minimum hardware will mean minimum performance. And while you don’t want to overspend initially, you want to beware of “Save money now, spend more later.” Find out what kind of rendering your designer will be doing. Hardware, software, CPU, GPU, RAM. Find a happy medium.

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