topic Re: Hardware Brokers? in Installation & update

Hardware Brokers?

Gus — Sat, 18 Jul 2015 17:37:14 GMT

I'm seeing that a really amazingly tweaked desktop could be pretty cool to set up, however I do not have the knowledge of what is out there right now and how to set it up? For example I don't know what it means to "overclock" something. I don't know if it's better to have 16 cores than 8, or if you will basically get the same functionality out of 8 as you do 16. Does an extra 32gigs of RAM help at all or does it just sit unused? I do run several softwares at a time. Chrome, ArchiCAD19, Bluebeam, and I like to have several tabs open in all of them. I also would like to invest in as much display real estate as I can, and I'm even considering having that real estate in the form of 4K definition. All this added up, we are talking a lot of money, and a lot of hardware all jumbled together. It's too much for me to comprehend. Are there people out there who really know their stuff regarding ArchiCAD hardware who can help me? If so, then how do I find them in the deep and wide sea of the internet? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Re: Hardware Brokers?

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 08:51:20 GMT

If there is money, then:
2011-3 socket motherboard
32GB of DDR4 memory
5820K CPU
Titan X or 980Ti, the 980Ti has more brute compute power, but the titan has 12GB Vram, or if you need Double Precision then take the old Titan.
The biggest model in Maya SVP12 test, doesn't use more than 2048MB Vram, I hope ARCH 19 is equally optimised.
600+W Seasonic G series of GOLD standard power supply (5years warranty)
A nice cooler like Thermalright macho + Case like Fractal R5

Samsung EVO 850 Pro SSD as much as you can afford, they have 5-10 years of warranty.

Optional (recommended):
UPS - if you have uneven current
Backup NAS server, a simple one to do daily backups.

If you want to use Cinema 4D and Team render, than you need a Router with gigabit ports.

We can go deeply into this, but Archicad does not offer a proper Benchmark tool since forever and the viewport performance of older than ARCH 19 is poorly optimised for GPUs and CPUs.

I hope it helps to get a starting point.

Re: Hardware Brokers?

Laszlo Nagy — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 14:10:03 GMT

My hardware component priority list, which means that I would rather spend more money on items higher on the list:

1. RAM (32 GB with the highest speed the motherboard can handle)
2. system drive - SSD, preferably PCIe-based for transfer speeds over 1 GB/sec
In a best case scenario, all my working ARCHICAD files would also be stored on this drive for much faster file opens, so I will be aiming for 500 GB or greater storage capacity. Samsung 850 EVO looks nice
3. CPU (highest base clock speed, with highest number of cores and largest possible cache size) - probably 5th generation i7 Intel
4. GPU - probably at least 2-3 GB of RAM, but most GPUs nowadays are brutally strong and OpenGL performance has been dramatically increased in ARCHICAD 19

This is what I would be looking for in my BIM workstation or laptop that would serve me well in the next 3-4 years.
Of course you wouldn't want to be thrifty on any of these because it is the best when the performance of all components is very well-balanced.