AutoCAD work PC

[tayy20]

Hi all... Been watching LTT vids for years but new to the forums so first off, hello :) I have a good understanding of PC's but the company i work for have recently asked me to look into upgrading our work PC's and was hoping someone here could give me some advice regards to GPU. We use AutoCAD, designing timber frame buildings in 3D and our current spec of PC is a quadro M2000 GPU, an intel xeon e5-1620 v4 CPU and 16GB of RAM which does struggle a bit when changing from wireframe to realistic etc. As a gamer PC enthusiast my thoughts for a new PC would be going for the latest gen AMD cpu, Ryzen 9 5900x, uping to 32gb of RAM and going for a RTX3000 series GPU. From what i can tell a 3070 would be sufficient enough for what we need but "workstation" pre built PC's i am coming across online suggest using a quadro again and a company we had a quote from suggested a quadro RTX 4000 which from what i can tell is older and costs more then the 3070, but would it have any benefits over a 3070 for AutoCAD? I have seen posts online from people saying the quadro is just an expensive name and 2080's etc. are able to out perform them in most cases. My main concern is guiding my boss into spending £2k on a pretty decent "gaming" PC but it not being too great for its intended "workstation" purpose. Appreciate any help in advance and welcome any recomendations you may have, thanks.  

 

[emosun]

have you checked usages on your work pc to determine where the actual problem lies? have you checked and opened one of your work files from autocad on a gaming pc to see if there's actually any improvement?

hate to see you spend 2k on a gaming pc only to find out you're hitting a software limitation in autocad and not a hardware limitation.

[TVwazhere]

Quadro's are recommended for workstation applications as they come with drivers specific to those compute tasks. However, AutoCAD doesn't care what GPU you throw in it past a certain point (I'm using a P1000 in my workstation, but I should note I'm doing simple outline drawings or electrical drawings most of the time). So getting anything above 3070 levels of performance would definitely be a waste. 

 

Some programs will in fact work better on more powerful GPU's as well as specifically workstation GPU's. Autocad mostly cares about Single Core performance (Frequency and IPC) so the Ryzen 5000 series would be a good suggestion, however many of the cores will likely end up going to waste on the 12 and 16 core parts. 

[LordVetinari]

I also used Autocad professionally - albeit Civ3D, but the compute level will be similar. 

 

The last workstation I had was an Intel i7-9700, 64gb Ram - I honestly cant remember what the graphics card was but it was nothing special - an M1000 maybe? All our PCs were black box specials from our deal with Dell.  

 

In my experience CAD tends to be more RAM bound than GPU. 

 

 

[brob]

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor  (£311.51 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12S 55 CFM CPU Cooler  (£54.98 @ CCL Computers) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME B550M-A (WI-FI) Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  (£118.27 @ Amazon UK) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory  (£281.51 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Storage: Crucial P1 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£92.98 @ CCL Computers) 
Video Card: PNY Quadro P2200 5 GB Video Card  (£385.69 @ Amazon UK) 
Case: Fractal Design Define Mini C MicroATX Mid Tower Case  (£69.73 @ More Computers) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (£80.93 @ More Computers) 
Total: £1395.60
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-11-12 16:14 GMT+0000

[AzzaNezz]

Jesus your companys pc sounds exactly the same like mine's company.What company do you work for?

 

[tayy20]

Thank you all so much for your responses... I have opened up one of my bigger projects along with task manager to see what is being utilized the most to see if there is any bottlenecks etc. but CPU is ramping up to maybe 50% max, same with RAM, less then 8gb of usage out of a total of 16gb and GPU is probably maxing to about 20%..but when in realistic trying to orbit around the drawing it is very stuttery, takes a good 15/30 seconds to change from wireframe to realistic and a few other commands it can take a while to load up and these are the issues we were hoping to solve with a new PC.

 

@brobthanks for the parts list, do you think there would be a significant diference over our current PC's?

CPU: intel xeon E5-1620 V4 3.5 Ghz (4 core)

Memory: single channel 16gb 2133MHz

Video Card: 4GB Quadro M2000

The operating system and programme is also installed on a 2.5" SanDisk SSD, everything else is just pretty box standard and shouldnt think it would effect performance much. 

 

@AzzaNezzHaha how strange, i work for a small family run company in the south of England mate. 

[prpa]

I will just leave my experience here. Working in Civil3d, and last year spent over 3000$ for CAD built. Wish i knew some of these things before I bought that comp.

As TVwazhere said, CAD only use 1 core (some commands like Regen or Redraw use more than one but that is not important).

I also bought Quadro P2000 with was IMO complete waste of money. If I'm buying now, I would go with gaming card.

Quote

Quadro's are recommended for workstation applications as they come with drivers specific to those compute tasks

They do have certified drivers, but performance drivers was last issued for AutoCAD 2011. From what i understood, certified means they will work, but it's not optimized for apps anymore. I may be wrong though, so check that if you want.

Also, last certified driver is 441.12, while newest nVidia driver is 452.57.

 

While checking for CPU utilization, be sure to look all cores individually since probably one is working on 100% and the rest doing nothing.

 

It is very difficult to say how much improvement you will get. Best if you have gaming GPU at home to test it there and see.

 

Are you working is plain CAD or you are using some plugins?

[brob]

@tayy20 yes.

 

The 5600X has 50% more cores and it's max turbo speed is 800 MHz faster. (Reviews suggest Zen 3 has a higher IPC than current gen Intel cores, which are significantly better than the Broadwell cores in the Xeon E5-1620 V4.)

 

Dual channel memory, especially the DDR4-3600CL16 suggested is much faster. This means higher performance memory accesses.

 

The NVMe ssd is roughly four times faster than a SATA III ssd. For even better storage performance a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive could be used.

[tayy20]

On 11/13/2020 at 8:59 AM, prpa said:

I will just leave my experience here. Working in Civil3d, and last year spent over 3000$ for CAD built. Wish i knew some of these things before I bought that comp.

As TVwazhere said, CAD only use 1 core (some commands like Regen or Redraw use more than one but that is not important).

I also bought Quadro P2000 with was IMO complete waste of money. If I'm buying now, I would go with gaming card.

They do have certified drivers, but performance drivers was last issued for AutoCAD 2011. From what i understood, certified means they will work, but it's not optimized for apps anymore. I may be wrong though, so check that if you want.

Also, last certified driver is 441.12, while newest nVidia driver is 452.57.

 

While checking for CPU utilization, be sure to look all cores individually since probably one is working on 100% and the rest doing nothing.

 

It is very difficult to say how much improvement you will get. Best if you have gaming GPU at home to test it there and see.

 

Are you working is plain CAD or you are using some plugins?

Hi @prpathanks for getting involved  I appreciate your feedback. I have a GTX 1070 in my own gaming computer, nothing too extreme to todays standard but when attempting to put in work PC, discovered the quadro wasn't even powered and after taking the 8 pin pcie out of my own modular supply, it wouldn't fit the one in my work PC so had to give up the test for now. In regards to the cores being used, we do run various other programmes at once, nothing too extreme, just teams, excel, word, chrome etc. We are using a plugin for autocad architecture called "HSB CAD".. have asked them for recomended PC specs but dont seem to get anything back. 

On 11/14/2020 at 12:12 AM, brob said:

@tayy20 yes.

 

The 5600X has 50% more cores and it's max turbo speed is 800 MHz faster. (Reviews suggest Zen 3 has a higher IPC than current gen Intel cores, which are significantly better than the Broadwell cores in the Xeon E5-1620 V4.)

 

Dual channel memory, especially the DDR4-3600CL16 suggested is much faster. This means higher performance memory accesses.

 

The NVMe ssd is roughly four times faster than a SATA III ssd. For even better storage performance a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive could be used.

thank you @brobappreciate the info! will definately look down this route, sure our boss would also prefer the savings over the unnecessary increased PC spec.