Why spend on a decent PC?

Got that new shiny van on a lease contract?  Treated yourself to some top of the range fitters tools?  Perhaps spent some good money on social media advertising?  But . . . still neglecting the one tool that really helps you produce the designs quickly and helps you win the sale?

I can picture peoples faces when I say that you should be willing to spend a good wedge of cash on a PC or should I say Workstation.  I put my money where my mouth is and have a very capable machine to run my CAD requirements.  However prior to my most recent PC Build I purchased one from a reputable online dealer thinking it would make all the difference.  I spent over £2k and to be quite honest I was underwhelmed by its performance considering it cost and especially when compared to the PC is replaced.  You see the problem with CAD in general is that different software packages use the hardware in different ways.

With the boom in the gaming industry the investment has been poured into the GPU (aka Graphics Cards) so you would be excused if you thought that by specifying a decent one with a good amount of memory is the answer to your rendering woes.  Compusoft, for example, do make a point of sticking to two particular brands, Nvidia and AMD.  No doubting that these work well with the render engine working within the software.  However the rest of the system needs to be up to scratch too.  I personally create the majority of my kitchen designs using Articad.  The GPU for Articad's use doesn't necessarily make all that much difference when it comes to rendering.  The area which makes all the difference here isn't even how fast your processor is, its actually how many cores (and therefore threads) the processor has.  I'm going to try and not go too geeky here so wish me luck . . . We're in the 'Desktop' section here on the forum so I will just say that typically the laptops, even if they seem like the same chip, i5, i7 etc, do not have the same number of cores and therefore are slower for rendering.  It also matters which generation of processor you get.  Where you can, try and get the latest generation.  The never ending chase for the best renders is meaning that the models/graphics we use in our designs are getting even more complex and so 'weigh down' on the system resources.  Articad now recommend, and rightly so, i7 5th gen or above. In my case I opted away from i7 but stayed in the Intel family and chose what is called a Xeon processor.  These CPU's (Central Processing Unit or Processor) are designed for servers with a high number of users working from them and hence they need to be very stable too.  They aren't as quick generally as i7's so you'll be a little disappointed if you want to join in with the latest 'shoot 'em up' games but for rendering, especially with systems such as Articad where the render engine (RedSDK) makes use of the cores, it can make a huge difference and helps reduce the render times greatly.  For more on the particulars of these systems or even if you have any other questions please comment below.

Until the KBB CAD software community catch up with many other 3D CAD software systems and offer CLOUD RENDERING (yes, there is a cloud for that too!) then my best personal advice would be - Don't be afraid to spent some of that marketing, tools, van budget on the PC that really helps you win business.

System Requirements
20-20 -                  https://www.2020spaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2020Design_SystemRecommendations_20140720.pdf
Articad -               https://www.articad.com/products/articad-pro/
Autokitchen -       https://www.autokitchen.co.uk/requirements/
Compusoft -        https://www.compusoftgroup.com/en-gb/solutions/sales/winner-design/system-requirements
Virtual Worlds -   https://www.virtualworlds.co.uk/spec.php

Cheers
Minch

AMD's Threadripper processor line also looks like great bang for buck if you are on a budget. 16 cores for under a grand can't be bad...you do have to buy the rest of the computer though...

Yep, looks like AMD are making a comeback too. They have some Xeon competing chips that are pretty extreme but much better priced. Had I bought the CPU's I used in my PC at full retail when they came out they would have been £5k each..... let alone, as you say, the rest of the PC! However, when I consider just how much quicker it is to produce my renders I would most likely pay full retail, rather than say, get a new van :-)

Agreed, showrooms should be investing in the best hardware. However as a one man band and saving for a deposit on new flat i had to go down the mid - budget route for the time being. It also had to be mobile so laptop it was
.
It really depends on how many renders you need to do per day or are clients wanting to see something done straight away! My line of business i may only get between 10 - 15 designs a month so an hour and half for each render at 2560 x 1650 render to file and on the Daz highest settings is ok for me. I can always be working on the next design while it renders.

I got my Lenovo for £850 at the time from John Lewis i think which at the time was £100 cheaper than PC world and the rest.
Would def get any computer now with SSD hard drive. So much quicker but make sure its got lots of storage as i have had to install all other programs on my d: drive as windows 10 and my articad folder is massive with all high res images, and sketchup models.

Looking at getting vray for one of my other cad programs so i will be looking at a Xeon hopefully soon!

Hi Joe,

Yes an SSD is a must. If you haven't already got one then its a like fitting a turbo to a naturally aspirated engine!

Over the years I've run a couple of Dell Precision laptops. The M Series. Very good for this type of work. I see that a fair few laptops are now also running Xeon chips, however they don't seem to have more cores unlike their desktop siblings so I would probably recommend sticking to the i7 variant.

Fingers crossed everything shifts to Cloud Rendering. This is where hopefully for a small increase in support costs we can allow 'x' number of renders per month. If you need to use more than a prescribed amount then hopefully this is a sign that you are busy enough to afford tokens to produce more top level renders and no just that people are being busy fools!

Joe, one part I'm interested in is how well your laptop performs carrying out other tasks when its under the full rendering load? Notice much of a slow down?

Cheers
Minch

Definitely agree, as a new start up business i bought a Dell laptop Core I7 3Ghz, 16 GB of RAM, and NVIDIA 2GB video card this time last year. This was great at the time because i was in the building stage of a new showroom which opened in March of this year.

When i opened and started to get busier i realized the speed of my renders was slowing me down and started to look around at Xeon machines as they seemed to be the way to go. I bought a refurbished HP Z620 with Dual Xeon E5 - 2650 2.6GHZ, 96GB RAM, NVidia Quadro K400 3GB GDDR5, SSD Hard Drives FOR £1,200 and i also bought 2 x 24" LG monitors.

I find this a huge improvement now in render speed and having two screens is brilliant been able to do 2 drawings side by side as well as running multiple applications simultaneously.

I have a long way to go in terms of the quality of my renders but they have improved a lot from the advise of all the people on this forum.

I have this laptop for Articad work:
DELL Inspiron 15 7000 i7-7700HQ , 16 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD & 128 GB SSD for windows and articad on it.
http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptop-and-2-in-1-pcs/inspiron-15-7000-gaming/spd/inspiron-15-7567-laptop
(just seen the black Friday deal for it online are more than I paid back in February for it lol )

When I set it to do a render I can still email and do other things etc. I find it just slows the render time a bit, but the machine still functions fine for the tasks I'm doing. Though I've not tried rendering one and then run Articad again to design the next.

Hi Dave,

Welcome to the forum! When you get a minute if you could add an avatar to your profile it really helps with people being able to identify who they are chatting with at a glace.

You've definitely gone down the right path. Technology moves at such a fast pace. Unfortunately many of the software developers in this market are afraid, and probably rightly so, of improving their software to a point where people customers need improved hardware above that of what they specified when they bought the software. I take a harsh line in that if you are using supposedly top end software and are in the game to make modest earnings from your business then its worth the investment to upgrade when the time is needed.

Two screens is SO useful. I got greedy and bought a third. For the first first weeks I hardly used it but now I'd be lost without it. I have quotes to my left, CAD in the middle and email on the right

Cheers
Minch

Yeah that's a decent processor in your laptop. Pretty much the best i7 you can get hold of in a laptop!

Nathan, i don't really have any slow down when rendering, maybe add a few min on to the render time but it's hard to check. Been quite happy with performance, could do with more ram which i will do after xmas. Before this i was using a macbook pro to run articad in bootcamp. Now that did struggle a bit to run other things in background!

It is hard for many companies to see the justification in spending a good proportion of there budget on hardware and even software. Firstly they are not seeing the bigger picture, if the designer is using a quality machine and sees his boss being proactive in getting the best in what is out there then this will only pay dividends.

The designers will stay with him/her, they will feel more valued and this will be reflected in the quality of his/her designs and can only lead to more sales.

Really it is Win, Win but many companies have outdated systems, old OS's, poor screens and poor software with staff clock watching who cannot wait for there workday to end..
This environment damages creativity and a designers progress in the KBB Sector...

You can have the best showroom in the land but a customer who is looking to purchase a kitchen, bedroom or bathroom wants to see how there kitchen will actually look before spending there thousands.

Spot on Daz . . . where is your Avatar!!! ;-)

Minch wrote:Spot on Daz . . . where is your Avatar!!! ;-)

Working on it.... Getting my hair and nails done today.... makeup later

Hahaha