BEST HARDWARE SETUP FOR ARCHICAD 10

[Anonymous]

jUST ABOUT TO GET A NEW SYSTEM AT WORK. HAVE BEEN DISCUSSING WHAT IS THE BEST SYSTEM TO GET FOR ARCHICAD. THE IT DEPT HAS SUGGESTED THE FOLLOWING TWO

Spec 1:

Dell Precision 490

Dual Core Xeon 5135 2.33Ghz

2Gb Quad Channel ECC DDR2 Ram

256Mb Nvidia Quadro FX 3450

80Gb 10k RPM HDD

16x DVD Burner




Spec 2:

Dell Precision 390

Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4Ghz

2Gb Dual Channel ECC DDR2 Ram

256Mb Quadro FX 3450

80Gb 10k RPM HDD

16x DVD Burner


ANY COMMENTS WILL BE ABSOLOUTLEY APPRECIATED

[Anonymous]

What scale of work do you do? Currently I'm using a machine with way lower specs than either of yours (see my signature for details), and AC11 is running fine. However, I'm only doing fairly small scale interior work. At my previous office I had a Dell P4 3ghz with 2gb of ram, and a 128mb nvidia graphics card (can't remember exactly which one). It ran AC10 very well, and the work was generally medium scale (5 story) residential, quite a lot of modelling in it.

So, to cut a long story short, I think those specs look good.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

what about XP 64-as an OS and then boost the RAM to 4Gb.

[Dwight]

More ram

Bigger drive. 80 Gb is kid stuff. Krikey. Had 80 Gb on laptop yeas ago already. Hardly enough room for music, games and internet television.

Dual burners? One will certainly fail if regularly used. Easier to copy DVD's, too.

How many displays and their sizes? Could go to 512 Mb on the video for smoother OpenGL.

[Anonymous]

I like the 10k rpm 80 gig drive to load common things like the OS and libraries. I would add another bigger/slower/cheaper drive for file storage (in fact, i added 2 to my machine and mirrored them for data redundancy)

Does the OS need to be 64bit in order to take advantage of more than 2 gigs of RAM?

[Anonymous]

Core II 6700 working really well for me. A great, cool running processor.
I think AC11 is a heavy processor user. The graphics card would be better with more ram but if you can up the processor it would have the most effect. I have been overclocking and am now running at 3.3 ghz. The only thing that slows things down is a file with excessive s.e.o.'s with many complicated wall profiles and complicated 3d mesh.

XP 64 bit lets you use 4 gigs of ram... Price of ram seems to make 4G reasonable.

And it is really dependent on the scale of work you do.

Good luck.

[Anonymous]

so changing the os to a 64 and upgrading the ram to 4 gig will improve the speed of archicad??

[Anonymous]

64 bit is explained here, Go for the extra RAM.

http://www.archicadwiki.com/64-bit?highlight=%28TechNotes/%29%7C%28Bugs/%29%7C%28Windows+XP+64-bit+e...

[Anonymous]

2G's of ram should work as a bare minimum. Archicad is made to use up to and only 4g's if I understand properly. The operating system can use upwards to 1g by itself. I have an older machine w/ 3g's and xp 32 bit that works fairly well. 32 bit XP can recognize up to 3g's.

The ram definately helps to a point. After that I really think the processor speed, and by extension, the front side bus speed, make the biggest difference as Archicad relies most heavily on the CPU. (if the cpu and fsb aren't fast enough all the ram won't be used efficiently anyway)

Oh yeah, and I agree about the hard drive. Around 150G min for the main drive (7200 rpm min, 10,000 rpm better) with the OS and Applications. That drive needs to be kept at least 50% empty and defragmented for maximum efficiency. I agree with Dom and keep all of my cad files, photos, music, etc. on another much larger internal raid drive.

[Karl Ottenstein]

An ArchicadWiki article responds to this question:

http://www.archicadwiki.com/What_kind_of_machine_should_I_buy

and...since it is a wiki, if someone has strong, informed views / data, consider adding to or editing what you see there. 😉

Karl