Digital_design

I am not saying Xeon's are bad processors, in fact they can be just the right thing if you're running software that can truly utilize all their cores or you need the stability of ECC memory. My post was never intended to promote one CPU over another, rather it was to comment on just how difficult that decision can be in the first place. Many people only regard Xeons as "server" computers, and they can be used for much more than that given the right software.

The generalizations are what is important, in this rare instance. This is true simply because it is indeed extremely difficult to answer the (what appears to be) simple question "What is the best computer for me?" in regards to optimizing Chief/Revit. I remember being absolutely dumbfounded when it came time to buy a suitable desktop or laptop. It took dozens of hours of research simply to begin to truly comprehend the difference between a workstation and a normal computer. Nvidia Quadro vs GeForce. Xeon vs I7-XXXX. Yadda yadda yadda. I could have easily purchased a dual xeon motherboard with a Quadro M6000 video card and dropped a fortune on the rig, only to realize that it didn't really help me much when it came to running Chief or Revit. Only in a true 3d modeling program like, say Solidworks or maybe 3dMaya would you begin to see a Xeon/Quadro combination really pull ahead. I didn't (and probably still don't) understand how Chief/Revit truly utilize the hardware best. Put succinctly, it amounts to this: Quadro M6000 card: $5000 Nvidia GTX980 Ti card: $650 Intel Xeon E7-8890 V3: $7174 Intel I7-6970HQ: $623 These are extreme and blunt examples but it illustrates the point; someone can easily drift FAR off course in the sea of computer hardware without a beacon of light to guide them. To me, spending $12,000 to see the same or worse performance than the $1,200 version (in their specific application) would be enough to drive someone to.....ahhhhh...... post random rants on internet forums?

I know for a fact you can find models that (as of this writing) would work perfectly for under $2000. Look for: I7-6820HK or I7-6700K or even I7-4790K CPU. Specifically, the "K" is of importance here. It means it has raw horsepower at the expense of power consumption, essentially. The 6700K would be preferable, IMHO, as it is truly a powerhouse CPU. It's base config is 4.0 Ghz, turbo up to 4.2 Ghz, and overclocked all the way up to 4.6ghz safely. If battery life is a priority, though, then a HQ designation would be more efficient, albeit with less power and no ability to overclock it (locked) 16GB DDR4 ram, a motherboard that is upgradeable would be great. 2133 ghz or 2400 ghz,speed RAM are both fine and don't get hung up on the 2400 ghz stuff because I highly doubt you'll ever utilize that extra speed. Make sure that your I7-XXXX architecture allows DDR4, else you'll be with DDR3. The I7-4790K will use DDR3 and will max out at 32gb on the system, whereas the other two CPU chips I mentioned can go up to 64gb. Nvidia GTX980m video card, with 8gb VRAM if you're with a UHD monitor or plan on connecting to a monitor sometimes. 4gb version will likely work just fine, but I'd want something just a tad more "future proof", and very soon 4k displays will be commonplace. The 970m falls off mightily in performance from the 980m, and with a 4+ghz CPU I'd assume the graphics card would become the bottleneck in the system if you didn't have enough GPU power. Upwards of the 980m the law of diminishing returns really starts to bite back hard. Visit gpuboss.com to illustrate what I am talking about. Most configurations will come with a 120-240gb SSD "boot" disk and a 1 terabyte conventional mechanical drive. Some will have RAID configs and have spots for expansion of another drive, especially if you get a 17" monitor as the chassis simply allows more room. There are a number of different brands that will have those three important features under the hood, and most will look like "gaming" laptops. Of this writing (4/14/2016) you can find one with all those for $1600-$2000, I have an affinity for ASUS brands (and especially motherboards), although MSI is fine as well. Other brands like Alienware (Dell) and Sager are good too, it just depends on what they have available at that point and at what price..... ....and what style you want the rig. Some of these cases can get pretty "gamer" looking, and it may not be the most professional thing in some people's opinion.

I apologize for the general ambiguity of my previous statement, but I do not know how well criticism is handled on this forum. Mentioning Revit, for all I know, could very well get me banished forever. For what it's worth, I believe Autodesk is the software equivalent of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars. With that being said, the link you requested is below: http://hardware.autodesk.com/ However, what I was specifically referring to was an extensive article written by no one directly affiliated with Autodesk on a forum that isn't even on Revit's domain: http://www.revitforum.org/hardware-infrastructure/75-revit-hardware-general.html Something similar to this thread in particular would serve Chief well, as it's information applies not only to Revit but most any professional design program. It is written by someone knowledgeable in computers who can, in a true (Idiot's Guide To...) fashion, translate the technical nuances of the software/hardware interaction into something that Architects and Designers can readily use to help make decisions. Autodesk makes an attempt at devising a program to assist clients in making hardware decisions, but it does indeed have a multitude of flaws. This doesn't mean that my point is any less important, rather, it gives Chief an opportunity to develop a (hopefully better) hardware selector of their own. If this information is readily located here somewhere please accept my apologies, as I was lead to the thread itself directly from a google search. I was simply meaning to bring attention to the great information this thread had sprinkled throughout it.

There is a plethora of information available in this thread that I wished I had located years earlier. In particular, how various hardware configurations can effect rendering and ray-tracing times in Chief, along with the the importance of a thorough understanding of light sources and their individual impact upon ray tracing. Somewhere in this thread one of the participants states the value this information has to potential Chief clients and that cannot be understated. The lack of concrete technical documentation that discusses various processors (i.e. I7-XXX vs Xeons), video cards (i.e. Nvidia GeForce 980m vs Quadro M4000) and how they directly relate to performance within various aspects of Chief Architect was ultimately the deciding factor for me to pursue Revit. Despite it being more expensive and more complicated, I was able to source the afore mentioned information much more easily. It is important to know some of the geeky details, such as: -Is a blazing fast processor more important than a top of the line video card? -Does the amount of memory on the video card directly effect performance in Chief? -Does a SSD hard drive vs a mechanical one make a difference if we don't have a ginormous amount of RAM to begin with? -How many CPU cores/threads can Chief effectively use, and when and where do we benefit from 24 cores vs, say, 8? (this is the Xeon vs I7 debacle) -At what point does added RAM no longer truly make a difference in Chief? -At what point does the bottleneck of the system switch from CPU to GPU and vice versa? When someone is building a machine for a very specific purpose it is of upmost importance to them to allocate their funds properly. I have a feeling many other people like me have found precious little information on the specifics of just how Chief Architect software interacts and utilizes hardware. It may not be the sexiest of information, but for many (including me) the lack thereof drove me to Revit.