Specific Help - A faster cad workstation
 

Hey guys I need help with a certain situation and would love opinions. I have a client that I've been working with that does Architectural work and uses of course Autocad. Over the last year at his request we've been doing upgrades to have cad run faster.

Well now I'm at a point in which I don't know what to get. Currently after upgrades he is running

P4 2.6c
2 gigs of pc 3200 ram
WD 1200jb


Reason why I'm asking for help is because I want to be able to offer a decent upgrade at not a crazy price. Of course I can get a firegl card, but is it worth $500 to get an improvement he doesn't notice?. Also I think it's not more the refresh and display, but the size of the files. Each draft he has is about 50~80 mb per file.

Any suggestions welcomes, and if anyone needs what other specs he has please ask

It depends on what a "crazy price" is :)

He probably needs a dual-processor setup (autocad is known to use dual processors quite efficiently). A nice videocard would benefit as well. A 9800 Pro (Sapphire) would get the job done. The RAM is fine. That's the only thing I can recommend: get a new motherboard with dual processors and a damn nice videocard.

He has to understand that AutoCad can only look/run so good...no matter what you have. If it's a huge file, it's a huge file. That'll slow any system down.

Well you could get a faster disk, or make a raid 0 array to increase data rates.........
as far a video cards I would definitely go with this one http://ati.com/products/fireglx2-256t/index.html
I know when I was doing CAD a few years ago I loved dual displays, and even now when I play in Photoshop it would be very nice....

to increase speeds you have to first know what is the slow point in the system, if the cpu usage high - if so go dual cpu
if its slow to render a video card upgrade may be needed
if it just takes a while to read and write to the hdd, go to a scsi raid array, or at least some 10k rpm SATA drives in an array....

I agree with RedJake. AutoDesk recommends twin processors. Expecially with the 3D modeling.

Look into a faster drive--a 10,000 RPM raptor or two should do the job. If the problem is reading and writing large files, that could certainly help.

Try monitoring the system to see if the bottleneck is processor (possible) or ram (unlikely with that setup).

I agree with the hard drive idea. Vid card and processors will help, but my guess is that it's the read/write time that he's noticing the most. I would go for 2 fast drives in a RAID 0 array. That should speed things up significantly.

ahem, a RAID 0 array with autocad files. I suppose he does regular backups right? I mean it sure would suck to LOSE all those work files because you doubled his chances of data loss from hd falure, right?
If you are going with a RAID-0 array, which sounds like a good idea, please remember that you're sacrificing data security for speed. Make sure there is a disaster recovery plan in place. Not a "we're talking about it someday" plan, but a real "we planned it AND implemented it" kind of plan.
Run a set of mirrored drives if you want, buy a tape backup system, whatever...just make sure you are actually making current backups.

Good call. Sticking work data on drives that arent backed up is a bad call. RAID 0 will only make it worse.

You can only do so much with hardware. A good video card is essential, as is a fast hard drive with enough free space for virtual memory (I would recommend at least 15 times the file size) What is this guy doing with 50 MB files? I work with 3D topographic/survey files covering up tp 500 acres (sometimes more), and the biggest files I work on are almost always under 10 MB - usually around 5 or 6..

Tell the guy to learn how to xref files instead of inserting them - if he's got everything on one file, that will really slow down AutoCAD. Also, the view resolution can really slow down screen refreshes. I work with curvilinear polylines, so I need mine set at around 3000, but 200 is fine for orthographic features. Also, ask him what kind of hatching he's using - hatches can triple a file size very rapidly. There's also the obvious - freeze unnecessary layers, and regularly purge your files of unused blocks. layers, etc.

Something is causing him to have unusually large files - I only go over 10MB if I insert large raster files - like aerial photos. And if I do that, I'll leave that layer frozen until I need it.

AutoCAD is processor intensive and memory intenseive. The only thing that AutoCAD would need very fast harddrives for is saving data, as AutoCAD files can get to be quite large.

I have a friend that is majoring in architecture at MIT. In their labs, they run Dell Precision Workstations with Dual XEON 3.2Ghz, 2gigs of ram and 10,000 WD Raptor drives.

AutoCAD is one of the few programs out there that can take advantage of dual processors to their fullest extent.

A couple Opteron's should do the trick.