I'm gonna need one of those desktop PC things. Anyone still know about them?

Application: 3D CAD & CAM, photoshop/lightroom, video editing. 

I have an attic full of monitors that I, uh, 'acquired' from work so I'll want to run at least two of them on it.

Not fussed about gaming, but 3D CAD is a bitch on graphics so I'm going to need something that can do that. Anyone know if the cheap (P600 and K620 are around £200 I think?) Quadro cards are any good/better than a gaming card? I'll mainly be using SolidWorks and Fusion360 on it. 

Should I go to the faff of self build, or just buy a box off a shelf? I've no idea what I'm doing with this stuff anymore T_T

What do you think?

He's no use, I'm going to need way more than 2gbtbh. Got 8gbtbh in my laptop and get low memory warnings when processing raw files in Lightroom :$

Does 3D CAD definitely need/use graphics?

For 3D modelling it used to be that a good multi-core CPU was more significant, but I'm guessing since GPUs are more a thing it probably has gone in that direction, (unless it hasn't).

I don't know what a good CPU is anymore either. Whatever you get you'll probably get all your caches hacked anyway.

Yep, 16GB minimum. I'm stuck with 8GB at work and constantly having to keep an eye and restart when it starts paging to disk, though most of it goes on the damned browsers (because they're all written by fucking idiots).

Lightroom since v5 is bloated shite however much memory you have.

The free alternatives are slowly improving - none of them are good enough yet, but hoping it wont be too long before they're viable.

Aye, 3D cad is very graphics card intensive, normally OpenGL rather than DirectX, and there's certainly a reliability boost by going with Quadro and certified drivers over consumer stuff, but what I'm struggling to find out is if the low end quadro I could afford would be any better performance than much higher end Geforce card.  A Quadro P600 2GB card is about £185 on ebuyer, for roughly the same money I could get a GTX 1050 TI 4GB card and I've no idea how to compare the two cards :D

My old Samsung laptop had a Geforce 650M and it ran SolidEdge brilliantly for the most part. When it got stolen it was replaced by a PC Specialist laptop with a 750M that barely runs SolidEdge at all due to shitty hardware design and drivers I guess (I don't currently use SolidWorks but I plan to switch to it)

Can you afford to buy both, benchmark, then return the lesser one within 28 days?

Sure, but I'm far too lazy to do that and I'd just end up keeping both :$

So far I've worked out that I want at least an i5-8400, that's a little over twice as fast as my current i5-4200m. Pretty sure I'm going to go with a consumer graphics card so I can play Civ games in between working....

I think Nvidia are announcing new cards on Monday so that could mean price drops on older stuff?

You may have already watched it



Simple explanation and benchmarks.
Probably still means spending £££ though.

"The sweet spot seems to be the relatively affordable P4000..."

*googles*


HOW MUCH>">!?!?!?!?!11

:'D I did the same.
It's the P1000 vs others for 3D/CAD stuff that is more interesting.

Yeah, the P100 is about £350 roughly  but stonks all over the consumer cards. Wonder how well it handles Civ...

Solidworks would definitely benefit from teh Quadro, even the cheap one over a consumer card.

However as for the time being I'm predominately going to be using Fusion 360, which is DirectX based, I won't really see or need that benefit. Think I'll go for a Geforce card for now and upgrade/change to Quadro if and when I need to.

Now... what's the best Geforce bang for buck, and how much will that change on Monday when they announce the new cards?

Despite saying I was going to wait for price drops etc., I ordered an xps system off Dell outlet. It had sufficient discount (I hope) to counter any likely price drops in the near future, and I get to have it now (well, 5th of September) instead.

Core i7 8700, 16 gbtbh, gtx 1060, one of them plug into the board SSD thingies and a 2tb proper drive.

The CPU is, apparently, 130% faster than my current laptop, and the GPU is similarly more advance. Hopefully it'll do me for the next decade :'D


*Cue massive price drop on everything on 4th of September*

> one of them plug into the board SSD thingies?

An m.2?

I considered one of those but the connector being underneath the motherboard was too much faff so I got a regular 2.5" SATA. Just realised I'm not sure if there's anything in the case to mount it though, probably need a 3.5" bracket. Arse.

Yeah an m.2 thingie. No idea where the connector is but it's a prebuilt system so I don't care :D

Just use duct tape to put a 2.5inch drive in a 3.5inch slot. Works every time.

Why bother with that? Just leave it dangling on the bottom of the case like I did.

I checked online, it's a Jonsbo U2 Mini-ITX case, and the drive bays are literally just screw holes in the bottom (or side) of the chassis...

So, no brackets, tape, nor dangling necessary. :)