Workstation suggestionsFollow

A couple of observations. The T7600 series chassis has actually been replaced by the T7610 which was released about a week and a half ago. If you are set on going bleeding edge top of the line, you may want to look there first, though it doesn't look like they have the customization options working on their site. The main difference is the T7610's will ship with hexacore Xeon's by default.

That being said, there may be a few areas to look at where you could get more power for your money. The Main draw of the T76xx series chassis is their ability to house a second CPU. If you are not planning on buying the second CPU, it might be better to look at a T56xx or even a T36xx, which is going to have a fairly large price drop between similarily configured models. Depending on what you are doing, you may want to consider adding the second processor. The T5600 also supports a second processor if you want to go that route. We don't have the 5600 listed on our Premiere site since we don't buy that chassis, so I can't look at the exact options it has. Why the hell dell changed their site so you can't even see the options without a premiere login I'll never know.

Autocad is one of those applications that truely will take advantage of all the Quadro video card features and processor horsepower you can throw at it, especially when you start using words like "Massive" and "3D Rendering" The more processor cores, the more ram, and the more video cards you can throw at it in SLI mode, the faster your renders will happen. Processor speed is secondary to processor cores in this instance, and physical cores trump hyperthreading virtual cores because autocad will be using the physical core to it's fullest extent. It's a similar story for ram. Faster ram does help, but if you can get 25% more ram by going with the slower stuff, it would be worth it in this instance. Autocad leverages the CUDA / FERMI engine for rendering quite extensivly though, so one of the best upgrades you can do is put multiple Quadro cards in the machine in SLI mode, regardless of the size or number of monitors. The video card is even more important than the ram or the processor in this particular instance.

If you only intend on going with a single quadro card, you do not need a 1300 watt power supply. Even a 525 watt is adequate to run the highest end single quadro. Going with dual Quadro 6000's would give you a tremendous boost in render speed.

If you aren't planning on running multiple drives, the smaller less expensive chassis would be the way to go. The T76xx series chassis are massive. They are taller than a cooler master ATCS 840 case, and they are really, really, really heavy. If you can go with the smaller chassis but double the video card, and a lower speed but higher core count processor or two and still meet your budget, that would likely be a worthwhile change.

If you can get them to spring for a fusionIO PCI express based SSD card, that would also be a good thing. That would probably obliterate your budget though.

Dell won't sell you a workstation grade card in a precision. We've tried to get them to do that for years. We use Microstation for our cad package at work, which doesn't support the quadro instruction set, so it makes no sense for us to use quadros, so what we end up doing for those few dell workstations we buy instead of building, is order them with the cheapest crappiest video card dell makes, then pull it and replace it.

That being said, All Autodesk software will make use of the rendering engine specific to the Quadro. It's one of the few applications where going with the Quadro actually gives you a measurable speed increase. That being said, there is an argument in favor of going with a really high end workstation class card Vs. a lower end quadro. A pair of 6GB 780 GTX's would perform better than a singe quadro 5000 series for example, and be about the same price.

I use a studdent version of Autodesk inventor for some of my 3D printing rendering stuff, it works fine on a pair of 3Gb 580 GTX's, even for fairly complex renders. Probably not on the scale you are dealing with, but my computer could probably handle it in a pinch if it needed to, and definitly if I upgraded the ram past 32GB even on the video cards as they are now. of course the hexacore processor helps somewhat.

Now I'm confused, as I thought a Quadro was a worksation card?

http://www.nvidia.ca/object/product-quadro-6000-us.html

I had no idea you were a CAD guy also. Want a job in Vancouver? :)

The real one, Canada :)

I had another conversation with our IT, and after he ran some real time tests using "performance monitor" and "process hacker" software while I was outputting some screen renders and an export to .stp, the conclusion was we just possibly saved the company several thousand dollars.
According to his tests, processer and ram results were well within operating specs, but the disk I/O was capped out and flatlining. My current hard disk is your basic old hard drive type.

So while the new machine would be faster, it wouldn't be 10 grand faster.

Since my current machine has Raid capability, we are going to test some SSD's in raid configuration, and test it again and see how things compare. I'll keep you updated.

Edited, Nov 21st 2013 11:29am by Xizervexius

Thanks Kao, I'll pass that along to the IT dept.