PC Specification - Archicad 21/22

[Anonymous]

Dear All,

I am currently looking to switch from Mac to PC for several reasons and would be grateful for your advise on the specification side of things. We are working on medium size projects of relative complexity, both worksharing and solo. We are currently using Archicad 21 but will be looking to upgrade to 22/23.

The specs of my current Mac are as follows:
iMac (21.5 inch, 2017) Processor - 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 Memory - 8GB 2133 MHz DDR4 Graphics - Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB. Needless to say, it is running extremely slow.

The PC I am currently looking at is:

Dell OptiPlex 7060 Tower Desktop PC Intel Core i7-8700, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD + 240GB SSD, 4GB Dedicated Graphic Card, Windows 10 Pro 64-bits

Would this be a good option to go for? Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards

Aleks Zigalovs

[Christophe Fortineau]

Hello,

Comfort of work also goes through the OS
The hardware is not enough to evaluate your migration from OSX to Windows
I work on PC and MAC every day with substantially the same characteristics
Since 4 years I've never seen any crash on OSX and many times on Windows
I don't know why but I notice that Archicad is more stable on OSX
Why a old 4Go RAM Macbook air is allready running as well as 10 years ago and why a 10 years old PC is allready unusable ? I don't know but you had to think about it before give up osx
I've worked some times also on Hackintosh but it was also unconvincing on via windows .. And I do not know why
The ideal would be to refer to a hardware expert with a strong liability about windows and mac

[Lingwisyer]

Go talk to your local reputable computer shop for a build, you won't get "onsite service" and will need to take it into the shop for any issues, but it should be a decent amount cheaper...

[Anonymous]

Dear Both,

Thank you for your advice.

Christophe, whilst I understand completely what you are saying with regards to both platforms, the situation I am currently facing is simple. The Mac I have is simply nowhere near powerful enough to work with in Archicad, it freezes all the time. It is not surprising as it has a very low spec, yet it costs the same as PC tower I mentioned earlier which is times more powerful. If I was to change our macs to a required spec (i.e. i7 processor, 32gb ram etc..) the cost would go through the roof, I have investigated into that. The iMac Pro with that specification costs around $4,900 which is very expensive.

I have previously worked with Revit on PC for 5 years and never had any serious issues. Whilst it may have frozen or crashed a few times, it had next to no effect on my daily routine. Computers were powerful, fast and didn't break the wallet.

[Christophe Fortineau]

Never compare the hardware specification of a Mac with a PC because the hardware resources are not managed in the same way between PC and Mac ... The tariff with equivalent technical characteristics is therefore not advisable. In addition, the delays on archicad are very often (95% of the cases) related to a bad use of a model. Finally a mac even aging can be modify to allow you to continue on a recent Archicad: change the hard disk in SSD and fill the 4 rack RAM. The most economical solution seems to me to do without waiting these two modifications. I work at home on a iMac i5 from 2013 which has 2 years of 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM ... AC22 runs beautifully

[Laszlo Nagy]

A_Zigalovs wrote:
The specs of my current Mac are as follows:
iMac (21.5 inch, 2017) Processor - 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 Memory - 8GB 2133 MHz DDR4 Graphics - Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB. Needless to say, it is running extremely slow.

The PC I am currently looking at is:

Dell OptiPlex 7060 Tower Desktop PC Intel Core i7-8700, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD + 240GB SSD, 4GB Dedicated Graphic Card, Windows 10 Pro 64-bits

To answer you question, yes, I think this machine will be powerful enough. I have one comment:
Drive sizes do not seem very much if you are planning for the next 4-5 years. If the HDD+SSD is a hybrid drive, you might want to consider a separate NVMe SSD drive for your system (I would recommend 500 GB - e.g. Samsung 970 EVO), and larger HDD (3-4 GB, they are very cheap nowadays).