AutoCad Pc help

SnowCells · August 15, 2018

My Dad's old 2012 PC is giving him some major trouble in performance. He is a surveyor and uses Autocad after the outside work for up to 3 hours. I am planning on building him a new one for Christmas. I am stuck on what i should get him for a CPU and GPU. I have a z370 mATX motherboard that i used for a few months, and would either get a 8700k or 8086k, however i have heard some people say that Autocad uses more cores for performance, and some say that it is single core, and would be better at a higher frequency. Then on the GPU side, I am expecting to get him either a quadro or a high end gtx 10 (maybe 20 if it ever comes out lol) card, but i have no idea what i would get him, and what would benefit him. His current system uses some old nvidia card that i have never heard of with 512MB of memory, an 8 core Xeon, and 8 gigs of ddr3 memory. Any and all help would be appreciated.

Blasteque · August 15, 2018

5 minutes ago, SnowCells said:

My Dad's old 2012 PC is giving him some major trouble in performance. He is a surveyor and uses Autocad after the outside work for up to 3 hours. I am planning on building him a new one for Christmas. I am stuck on what i should get him for a CPU and GPU. I have a z370 mATX motherboard that i used for a few months, and would either get a 8700k or 8086k, however i have heard some people say that Autocad uses more cores for performance, and some say that it is single core, and would be better at a higher frequency. Then on the GPU side, I am expecting to get him either a quadro or a high end gtx 10 (maybe 20 if it ever comes out lol) card, but i have no idea what i would get him, and what would benefit him. His current system uses some old nvidia card that i have never heard of with 512MB of memory, an 8 core Xeon, and 8 gigs of ddr3 memory. Any and all help would be appreciated.

AutoCAD is not particularly demanding graphically. There are some Autodesk products that are, but not AutoCAD. In my experience single thread performance is more important, but that was a few years ago, things might have changed with newer versions. Definitely make sure you're using SSDs and plenty of RAM.

As for GPU, again in my experience, workstation graphics cards really aren't wroth it unless you're using a lot of visualization or animation (that is hardware accelerated). I use Solidworks all the time and a decent gamer card is more than enough. I wouldn't break the bank for the GPU, the money is better spent elsewhere.

komar · August 15, 2018

Dude wtf!

We use CAD on core2quads and second gens i5s at the uni and they work decent!

I just tried it on my main rig about CPU usages - it definetly hits all of the ryzen 1500x 8 threads so it sure use multi core - not a lot tho but I don't have very complex drawings...

brob · August 15, 2018

Autocad is still mostly single threaded. Best performance therefore is found in the best performing core with the highest frequency. At the moment that is the i7-8700K. Almost as fast is the i7-8700, just 100 MHz slower turbo clocks. (The i7-8086K advertises a 5 GHz clock, but its turbo clocks are the same as the i7-8700K making it essentially a binned i7-8700K.)

Unless he games, I'd suggest getting a Quadro P2000 gpu.

2x8GB of DDR4-2666 or faster memory and a 500GB+ ssd should round out the main hardware.

You may want to take a look at the recommendations made in https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Autodesk-AutoCAD-134/Hardware-Recommendations.