in need of hardware advice - video card, etc.

[Anonymous]

If anyone could offer any insight on the following, I would greatly appreciate it. I am planning to buy a Dell desktop to run archicad 9. I am in graduate school and am broke, so I need to get the least expensive package I can find. Will the following specs be okay?:

Pentium 4 Processor
512MG SDRAM
40G hard drive
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (GMA900)
also known as: ATI Radeon X300 SE

Thank you!
Elizabeth

[Stephen Dolbee]

Elizabeth,

Over the past 10 years I have purchased 3 Dell computers and have been happy with them all (all are still running). 512 memory is the minimum requirement, but should be OK. My concern would be the graphics and whether or not the 512 memory is "shared" or not. Dell has several models with "shared memory", which shares as much as 224mb to support graphics. I think this could affect performance greatly. A system with a min. 64mb graphics card would be my recommendation-and no "shared" memory. Looking at Dell's August catalog, the Dimension 5100 would be my choice as a minimal system configuration. Just my opinion, though.

Steve

[Anonymous]

Thanks for getting back to me! I asked the dell representative and she said that the video card does not share - it has its own memory - and i upgraded to 128 based on your advice.

Thank you - I can't wait to dig into archicad on my new machine!!!

Elizabeth

[Stephen Dolbee]

Enjoy your new machine-and Archicad 9!

Steve