Looking to add a CAD and GIS workstation for the consulting work I do for farmers when I am not in a tractor. Currently limping along with an old i7-640M 2.8GHz processor with 3MB L3, 4 or 8GB RAM, 7200rpm hard drive and Nvidia NVS5100 graphics with 1GB DDR3 memory. Seemed adequately big at the time .... 6 and 7 years ago. My CAD use is spooling back up and since the USDA Geospatial Data Gateway imploded I am working with larger datasets now inside GIS - countywide instead of small clips. I am looking at a Dell Precision T5610 workstation with a Xeon E5-2643 quad core 3.3GHz, 64GB RAM (non ECC), solid state boot drive and second hard drive, and Nvidia Quatro 600 graphics with 1GB memory. This is refurb workstation. About $1600. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68F5BJ4660&Tpk=9SIA68F5BJ4660 From what I can tell, this workstation has about double the single-thread performance of my old machine, and since CAD is mostly still a single-thread process, that is a significant performance bump. Can go faster with an i7 on single threads but i7 isn't the workhorse Xeon is. And Xeon goes to 8 threads with Hyperthreading, better system cache as well. Also can use 40-50GB of RAM in larger drawings, or tabbing back and forth between CAD and GIS. I don't do much 3D modeling other than basic surfaces with Civil3D, so I am assuming this (dated) graphics card is sufficient for that. Questions: Am I dumb not to have ECC memory? It's a new thing to me. I haven't computer shopped for 7 years. This seems more expensive than I remember for computer desktops, but it also seems like way more PC than a consumer-grade desktop. I bought commercial-grade hardware before and it has held up well for many years. Is a Dell Precision the commercial grade hardware here? I can build a PC from scratch, if I stop to think about it. It's been 20 years. Am I going to get significantly better performance for my money if I do that? Any sources to get to ready-to-assemble kits? Especially if they are CAD-certified hardware/drivers? |