1

Dear experts,

I’m asked to recommend workstation for architect. We use Windows platform, and we prefer HP.

They usually work with:

  • AutoCAD LT 2016
  • SketchUp with V-RAY plugin

We’re considering classic PC and Workstation:

  1. HP ProDesk with i7/16GB/1TB SATA/NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 2GB
    for 700 USD
  2. HP Z240 with i7/16GB/256 GB SSD/Intel HD Graphics 530
    for 1 300 USD
  3. HP Z240 with XEON E3/16GB/256GB SSD/NVIDIA Quadro K2200 4GB
    for 2 000 USD

Their business is running fine, so they don’t have to save each buck, but don’t want to spend needlessly. They just wont to work continuously with no crashes.

As I know, it’s not possible to utilize multithreading during rendering. So CPU should have less cores with higher frequency.

What would you recommend to pay extra for and why?

  • Z240 instead of ProDesk?
  • Xeon instead of i7?
  • SSD instead of SATA?
  • graphic card?

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
Jarda

12 Spice ups
2

Get an ACAD approved video card. I am not sure if their site has a list of recommended GPUs or not.

6 Spice ups
3

Your products are wildly different, low end graphics, integrated graphics and a workstation level card. What are they using now? Are they happy with the performance?

Workstations generally cost more due to the driver certification the vendor does with certain applications. Does HP certify Autocad with their workstation? That’s something to consider.

4 Spice ups
4

Your graphics card is going to be your most important spec. Followed by as much RAM as you can get.

5 Spice ups
5

How about the Surface Studio ? There was an announcement today about Windows 10 Creators update and the Surface Studio here: Windows 10 Creators Update coming April 11, Surface expands to more markets .

6

Even the top end unit comes in at under $700 a year

What do they pay the operator…

Having worked in creative services for many years I know that buying a $6000 Mac and Eizo Screen setup paid for itself in “happy user” value before you even add up the time saved in rendering etc

7

We use Hp Z workstations for our drafting department which uses various products from Autodesk. We went with SSD drives, 16GB of RAM (32 for the real power users), and Nvidia Quadro for graphics. These units haven’t skipped a beat and everyone has been pleased that I asked that we move from Lenovo to HP.

6 Spice ups
8

Nobody should be using a spinning drive for boot…its should be made some sort of global rule;-)

a 250GB SSD is under $100

5 Spice ups
9

We use the lower end Precision Workstations here (3000 series), which would be comparable to Z240. You want:

  1. Processor with the highest clock speed possible. Go i7 because you don’t need the extra cores that a Xeon will offer. The upper level i7s have L3 cache’s comparable to the Xeons for your purposes.

  2. AutoCAD approved workstation graphics card (Quadro or FirePro). My users have had much better luck with Quadro than FirePro. The newest line is insanely powerful as well.

  3. Fastest RAM possible. 16GB minimum, no maximum.

  4. SSD <----- All of the above won’t make a difference if they’re bottlenecked by a spinning disk HDD

Workstations (Z240 in this case) generally offer 3 things:

  1. Xeon processors
  2. ECC RAM (an extension of the Xeon processors - not all of them require ECC RAM though)
  3. Bigger PSUs

ECC RAM adds a little bit of latency over non-ECC. Since you’re not buying servers, I don’t think you need it.

Regular desktops might not have a powerful enough PSU to drive a workstation graphics card. Check with HP on this.

6 Spice ups
10

My BIM/AutoCAD department uses i7’s, Quadro M4000 cards, minimum of 32GB RAM and SSD’s. I also usually slap a minimum of a 1200w PSU in.

2 Spice ups
11

I have to agree with the first post, look at the HCL list for the software you use.

price from there.

2 Spice ups
12

Have they considered portable. An HP Zbook would give them the quadro graphics they likely need in a package that their designers could take home and use if need be. Yes they are heavier than a standard laptop but the performance is excellent.

2 Spice ups
13

Hello @JardaCZ81, thank you for your post and we appreciate very much the HP recommendations. See the input from our consultant:

#########
Autodesk AutoCAD LT 2016
SketchUp
Chaos Group V-Ray for SketchUp

► System requirements are generally not very high. However pay attention to some specific needs:
**● Autodesk AutoCAD LT 2016 **

**● SketchUp **
"SketchUp is a graphics-heavy application. We suggest always keeping your graphics drivers up-to-date. Updating drivers can often correct odd visual behaviors such as freezing, artifacts, model slicing, and slow performance.
3D class video card with 1GB of memory or higher and supports hardware acceleration. Please ensure that the video card driver supports OpenGL version 3.0 or higher and is up to date.
SketchUp’s performance relies heavily on the graphics card driver and its ability to support OpenGL 3.0 or higher. To test your graphics card’s compatibility, please download and run the SketchUp 2017 Checkup application . Historically, people have seen problems with Intel-based cards with SketchUp. We don’t recommend using these graphics cards with SketchUp at this time."

**● Chaos Group V-Ray for SketchUp **
“Note that V-Ray is only supported for 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit versions of SketchUp.”

► Parallelism and Computing - Priscilla@HP Jan 23, 2017 at 3:15 PM
Parallel computing support - GPU Application Catalog :
"AutoCAD Supported Features:
• Release 2014, Surface, mesh, and solid modeling tools, model documentation tools, parametric drawing capabilities. Native DWG™ support.

Chaos V-Ray RT (Real Time) Supported Features:
*• CUDA interactive GPU Rendering, Media and Entertainment *
V-Ray RT (Real-Time) is Chaos Group’s interactive rendering engine that can utilize both CPU and GPU hardware acceleration to see updates to rendered images in real time as objects, lights, and materials are edited within the scene."

► Autodesk AutoCAD recommended and certified graphics cards
The list is not ever complete due to the technical development. You can use graphics cards from the same family.

► Conclusion
● Only features above benefit from CPU multi-threaded (CPU multi-core), multi-GPU and GPU-accelerated computing. If you are not using these features extensively and very often then prefer CPU’s higher frequency over CPU’s number of cores. Otherwise more parallelism both CPU and GPU is better in this case due to Chaos V-Ray.

● Avoid Intel graphics cards due to known compatibility issues with SketchUp.

● I personally would prefer NVIDIA graphics card with as many CUDA as possible, minimum 1 GB memory and verified OpenGL version 3.0 or higher support.
● Prefer larger CPU’s L1-L3 caches over higher frequency CPU.
● RAM/CPU: Higher number of channels & memory bandwidth is better.
● RAM: minimum 16 GB. Preferably in four channels, which depends on CPU.
● SSD laptop: M.2 PCIe 3.0. Avoid M.2 SATA due to SATA bottleneck.
● SSD desktop: Preferably NVMe PCIe or M.2 PCIe 3.0. Avoid SATA SSD.
● Consider number of external monitors, their resolution and type of interconnection - direct cable and/or docking station.
#########

@latal

5 Spice ups
14

Big Green and Priscilla have it.

Sketchup and Autocad heavily rely on the use of OpenGL. So does DraftSight and most other CAD/3D rendering software.

Intel Video has very poor OpenGL support (almost nonexistant)… They went the route of OpenCL instead. If you’re not using a Quadro or FirePro, you’re going to be shooting yourself in the foot.

As some have also pointed out already, You really want faster cores, and not necessarily more of them. You could probably get away with a 4 core i5, instead of an i7, since all you really lose is the hyperthreading that isnt likely to be used.

4 Spice ups
15

Hello Essajae, thanks for reply.

Now they use computers as in first example (ProDesk i7/16GB/SATA/low end graphic). They even use older version AutuCAD LT 2011. They complains about frequent crashes.

Jarda

16

Hello Toby. Their business is going well, but not as well to buy 6000 USD device to users. I’ll try to make “almost happy users” with only Z240 with some Nvidia Quadro graphic for 2000USD :slight_smile:

Regards,
Jarda

1 Spice up
17

Hello Rockn,

I tried to find approved graphic cards and see what:

  1. AutoCAD LT 2017 specs here
    Windows display adapter capable of 1920x1080 with True Color capabilities and DirectX 9 ¹. DirectX 11 compliant card recommended.
  2. SketchUp help article here
    We recommend any graphics card that fully supports OpenGL 1.5 or higher and has at least 64 MB of video memory. If you’re going to create large models, we recommend a graphics card with more than 64 MB of video memory.
    Nvidia GeForce GT730 supports OpenGL 4.4 ( nvidia scpecs here ).
  3. V-RAY for SketchUp chaosgroup requirements
    They even don’t specify graphic cars. They just say if you have Pentium 4 with 4GB RAM, you’re OK.

That’s why I’m discussing it with community.

Regards,
Jarda

18

Hello Chris, it look very good. I think they don’t want to pay 3500 USD for device, but I’ll show it to them.

Jarda

1 Spice up
19

Hi Sean, thanks for reply. That’s exactly what I want to sell them. But I need to be sure it’s not needless. What do your user use for Software and how large are the drawings?

Jarda

1 Spice up
20

Hello Big Green Man, so you would recommend Z240 with Quadro and SSD, right? This is what I think is the best for architects.

Regards,
Jarda