Overdue for hardware upgrades, need advice

[Anonymous]

Help, I'm trapped in the stone age! Ok, it might not be that bad but I need some expert opinions. I have been trying to get my company to upgrade hardware for awhile with little to no success. Below is our current configuration for running AC 8.1.

1.6 Gig AMD Athlon
512 MB SDRAM PC 133 MHZ
64 MB PCI ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card
10 Gig hard drive.

We are a log home manufacturer, so the scale of our projects are fairly small, but occassionally we will get into renderings and animations. And from what I have researched this setup is severely lacking in several ways. If anyone has any comments or can give me some suggested upgrades I would greatly appreciate it.

The desired setup I am hoping to get to:

1.6 Gig AMD Athlon
1 Gig DDR RAM
256 MB AGP 8x Nvidia
10 Gig hard drive.

That will at least help speed things up and hopefully not crash as often.

Is there anyone out there that believes our current hardware configuration is acceptable for running AC 8.1 and that upgrades are unnecessary?

[Erika Epstein]

Try looking at the problem another way.
How many hours a week are you "waiting" (not being billable) for the computer?
On the average how many hours do you lose because of slow rendering times and/or crashes or other down time?
Multiply this times your billable rate and that is how much time in $ you are being unproctive because of inadequate hardware.

If a new computer costs $5000 and you're billing rate is $65 an hour, than a new system will pay for itself in 77 hours. After the 77 hours you will be making $X more money a week.

I'll let others comment on the hardware specifics but even to me you are asking for just a less out of date computer.

Of course, I'm not paying for the new system.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Looks like you don't want to buy a new motherboard, only upgrade the RAM and graphics card.
However, if you do change, get a 3000+ or better processor plus 1 GB of DDR400 RAM, which is 3x faster than 133 MHz SDRAM. It's not that much more expensive either, I think.

[Anonymous]

I agree it would be better to go with whole new systems or at least new motherboards. But believe it or not the motherboards were upgraded not too long ago and we have at least 15 machines to upgrade each time. So the reason for the minimal upgrades is due to financial concerns.

I guess what I was wondering, is if there were any other companies out there using Archicad that are using similar hardware or if we are well below par for the course?

Thanks, Nick

[Laszlo Nagy]

Our office has large residential projects. We are currently working on a 120-flat project, which is about 160000-180000 sqft in total size. We model the whole building, keep our Sections/Elevation as models for the entire duration of the project, have some special GDL stuff, too. A project file like this becomes 80-100 MBs in size by the end of the construction documents phase. We will buy some new computers and I am aiming for 3000+ processors with 1 GB of RAM. This will be enough power for the next 2-3? years, hopefully

If the motherboards are not old, check what is the strongest processor they still support and upgrade to that.