Actually a little background. Shelly's the official AutoCAD witch around here. And the projects she does on AutoCAD (actually Civil 3D, which is a special super-extended version for Civil Engineering) are absolutely enormous. And they take up gobs of memory and every bit of processor you can throw at it.
And now AutoCAD 2009 is now in the channel, which means that Civil 3D 2009 is gonna be arriving very soon.
And this software is not cheap. Very not cheap. Five figures kind of not cheap.
In looking at ways to improve the workflow a bit, it's clear that one of the bottlenecks is the hardware. Her three year-old 3.8 Ghz hyperthreaded machine is still a very solid computer and was the hottest thing on the market when we bought it, speed-wise it's now about the class of a $400 machine. Also it's hit the memory wall. It's got 4 gig, which is as much as the motherboard as well as XP can handle.
I found a quite-nice article by a guy who built a quad core 8 gig server for $900. I figured if I can improve performance for that kind of price, it's easily worth it.
Only problem with the article is that the video card is a mite anemic, which is expected as it's a server machine. Figured if I could cut a few bucks off here and there I could upgrade the video card.
Also I got a Vista 64 license on the way (which supports lots of cores and memory), so that's just kismet.
So I'm buying up bits. I'm not in a huge hurry because the new Civil 3D and Vista 64 haven't yet arrived. Figured there's not much point in building a machine just to wait until the software arrives, and migrating existing Civil 3D from one machine to another is a pain and requires you to call up your AutoCAD reseller who then has to call Autodesk and convince 'em you're not a pirate.
Fry's had the CPU on sale last week for $180. They also had a similar case and power supply for $85, so I'm gonna grab that today. I'll probably get the memory and motherboard by mail-order because motherboard features aren't something I fully grok and Fry's doesn't sell the exact motherboard the guy mentioned on his page. The folks on newegg think that motherboard is the dog's bollocks (to use a Texas vernacular), so I figure that's a good choice.
I'll probably get a hard drive locally. The existing computer currently has a 75 gig drive that's only 2/3 full, so I'm not gonna kill myself getting a giant drive. 120 or 160 gig drives can be had pretty cheaply nowadays, so that'll save me a little.
Thus far, I think this is my parts list.
- Intel quad-core CPU (same as that guy's system) ($180)
- MSI motherboard (same as that guy's system) ($130)
- 8 gig of memory on four simms (same as that guy's system) ($160)
- Similar Antec case and power supply (Fry's had an all-black one on clearance) ($85)
- 120 or 160 gig SATA drive, whatever's cheaper (around $90)
- one of those huge nVidia 8800 leafblower video cards (around $200)
- Nice front-mounted multi-card-reader-thingy instead of a floppy drive ($30)
- CD/DVD burner taken from an old computer we no longer use (free)
- Vista 64 (included in our MS subscription pack)
Total - $875
And that's pretty good. According to the folks on the Autodesk forums that Shelly frequents, Vista and versions of AutoCAD after 2007 are good pals. And we've noticed that ourselves. Shelly's running a second Civil3D on her little cheapo Vista laptop (because according to their license, that's allowed), and it runs very well.
So hopefully that'll fix some problems. As I told Shelly, if $900 can make a $10k piece of software run twice as fast and twice as stable, you do it.
Now I just have to get the parts and put it all together, which is always a hassle. Ain't looking forward to that part.
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