Graphics Card Advice

[Anonymous]

Planning a DIY computer build using the i7 920 with 6gb of ram and a 23" monitor among other things. Just wondering if ATI HD5850 will be capable of performing well in ArchiCad 13???

[Laszlo Nagy]

The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is one of the fastest graphics cards available today.
Should do very well with ArchiCAD performance-wise.
You will probably not even use all its capabilities.
Just make sure it has enough RAM, like 512 MB, so you can use it well in the next 2-3 years.

[Anonymous]

Awesome, thanks for that, the card I'm looking at has 1gb of ram so I'd say I can use it in the next 3-5 years?

[Laszlo Nagy]

Well, I would say both the RAM size and the performance have a role.
I would say that most of the computers have an average life expectancy of 2-3 years nowadays. In 3 years computers will be at least twice as fast as today. 5 years seems a bit too much in this fast technology.
Also, new operating systems and new versions of programs almost always have greater system requirements. This is why I personally am usually planning not more than 3 years for the life of a CAD machine.

[Anonymous]

Without a doubt I will be upgrading parts within the build before the 5 years runs up, just glad that I don't have to spend $1000 on a workstation card 😉.

[KeesW]

We've had our two machines 2.5 years and they are still fast. However we can upgrade the motherboard, processor and graphics to the latest and greatest for about $2,500 per computer.

Mmmm....don't know. My brain can't keep up as it is!

[Arcadia]

You won't regret going to 64bit windows and 6g of RAM. On my old 32bit system with 3g RAM I was struggling to run 2 instances of Archicad at the same time stably. With 9g of RAM now I can easily run 4 or 5 instances of Archicad at once (I often do this when I am working on unit jobs with multiple unit types and a site plan all on different files and want to be able to jump from one file to the other regularly) no problems. I regularly see 4-5 g of RAM usage on my system monitor doing this so you might want to even go a bit more to have spare RAM. Can I also suggest putting a second graphics card in to give you the option of running 3 (or 4) screens instead of two - you can never have too much screen real estate:)