Need Help With Build For 3D CAD Work

[PeterAlta]

Budget (including currency): $800 USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: This is for 3D CAD work, see below.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

Wont be using existing parts. No peripherals needed. Upgrading from the "Costco Special" - DELL XPS 8900 desktop...P.O.S.

 

I work in the fire suppression industry here in the western US, designing fire sprinkler systems. The program I use is called AutoSPRINK. It is a 3D design software for drawing fire sprinkler systems and components and to perform hydraulic calculations to ensure the system is adequate to meet the demand of the fire hazard of a given building. Even though it IS a 3D design program, it does NOT need to render high quality 3D elements. They are just simple 3D elements meant to represent pipe, fittings, valves, etc. That said, a large drawing with a large number of these 3D elements really bogs down my desktop. I checked the recommended specs for my version of the software and my desktop is no where near close. It "does the job" and that's why we haven't upgraded. Some of the functions and commands take up to 5 minutes to complete. Not to mention when saving a file, a large file can take up to 5 minutes to save (due to the only storage on the PC is a single HDD. Anyone who works with CAD knows to save often. Manual saving combined with the auto-save feature, you could be saving between 5 and 10 times a day. The math is obvious, taking upwards of 45 minutes a day just to save your work! Crazy!

My work desktop:

Windows 10 Pro

DELL XPS 8900 Desktop

Intel i7-6700 CPU @3.40GHz 3.41 GHz

NVIDIA GeForoce GTX 745

16GB installed RAM

2 TB HDD

 

Recommended Specs from AutoSPRINK website : https://autosprink.com/help/81

Intel® Core™ i7-9700K processor

32GB DDR4-3000 memory

NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER™ graphics

512GB M.2 NVMe SSD

Microsoft® Windows® 10 Pro

 

Here is the catch- to get these specs in a build, it would cost nearly $2,000. We are a small company and that is a lot of money. There are two of us designers that would need an up grade and the budget number that was tossed around by the bosses was $800 per computer. It sucks but at the moment that's what I have to work with. We don't need peripherals/monitors. We both use 2 27" displays for our work. We also wouldn't need fancy cases, just something cheap that does the job. My PC building knowledge is limited but I am learning. I just built my first PC (with great help from the LTT content) for personal use at home and I am planning on bringing that into work so I can compare the difference in performance (and hopefully show the bosses it's worth upgrading). 

My personal build:

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

GeForce RTX 2070 Super

RAM-32GB (4 x 8GB) GB DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 

ASUS Prime X570-P Motherboard

Sabrent Rocket Q 1TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD R/W 3200/2000 MB/s

Windows 10 Home

 

I hope all this makes sense. I need help knowing what components to invest in to provide best performance for my limited dollars, and which components I could probably eek by with. Almost anything would be an upgrade from what I currently have but I would appreciate any help anyone can offer to get us closer to the recommended specs.

Thanks,

[TVwazhere]

13 minutes ago, PeterAlta said:

I hope all this makes sense. I need help knowing what components to invest in to provide best performance for my limited dollars, and which components I could probably eek by with.

It's hard to tell given autoSPRINK's various levels of "builds" if CPU or GPU speed is more important. My guess based on my AutoCAD (And Inventor) experience is that the program leverages the CPU more so than the GPU, but this isnt true across all software. If you can, when you bring in your personal computer to show your boss a side-by-side, make sure to note what parts of your system are being loaded (CPU or GPU)  you can use something like HWinfo or HWmonitor to log both temperatires as well as min max and current usage, which can potentially tell you if your software prefers high single core count performance, High multi core performance, high GPU performance, or a combination of them.

 

 

Again, my guess would be that the program will care more about high Single core or Multi core performance, and that the GPU is just there to output a video signal (possibly a bit of hardware acceleration). If you can, switch out the GTX 745 in your work computer into your personal computer and see how it performs (and vice versa into the dell if the PSU can handle the 2070S) to get a good A/B comparison. Anything beyond a normal SATA SSD will not usually impact save/load times greatly, so while you should see a decent bump in time saved, it wont be lightning fast vs dinosaur loading windows noticeable. 

[Gmoneyinthebank]

Autosprink is probably using GPU calculations for the matrix calculations related to fluid flow.  Which is why they have such high graphics card requirements.

 

$60 per hour per engineer with burden and overhead

$1 per minute per engineer

45 minutes of lost productivity per day

250 business days a year 

$45*250= $11,250 dollars lost per engineer per year

$33,750 lost productivity over 3 years using the computer.

 

Tell him that he can pay $30,000 to watch you to sit on your butt drinking coffee or pony up the dough to meet the minimum specifications for the software.

[PeterAlta]

On 7/16/2020 at 11:20 AM, TVwazhere said:

 If you can, when you bring in your personal computer to show your boss a side-by-side

This is a great point to start from and I do plan on bringing it in to compare. I'll be sure to post in here what the results are to get more feedback. Thanks!

19 hours ago, Gmoneyinthebank said:

Tell him that he can pay $30,000 to watch you to sit on your butt drinking coffee or pony up the dough to meet the minimum specifications for the software.

This is also a great point lol. Some times those who make business decisions jump over a dollar to save a dime. There will always be the argument, "well I don't know why you need an upgrade, your still getting projects done." There will definitely be a conversation about what is worth more, time spent waiting on a crappy desktop or saving a some money on said crappy desktop.