orencons

awesome!!!!!!!

See the attached roof eave. Please advise what is the shortest way to build on ChiefArchitect x8 without making a polysolid. Thanks!! Or

So all the practical advise on this forum about sizing to your needs and value has lead us back to buy a more reasonably priced desktop for our residential remodeling drafting needs, which for the most part are no larger than single family house designs. (Although finger's crossed we are designing a small development.)

We bought 

Intel® Core i7-6700 Processor (8MB Cache, up to 4.0GHz with Turbo Boost Technology)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 with 2GB

16GB Ram

2TB 7200 rpm Hard Drive

for the lovely price of $1,295.99. 

Thanks for helping us shop smarter. It isn't the top of the line, but it is much smoother than what we had!

The "not responding" means that the program is either tied up processing something or is waiting for something it needs to finish a process. While in this state the program can't execute the next command. To erase a measurement line are you using the delete command or the Undo. Delete should be much faster than an Undo.

 

Thought this recent purchase was a pretty good deal. Had been watching the Dell site for a few months as they are always changing pricing and configurations. All of a sudden a configuration with the overclocked Skylake I7 6700k showed up for $1299 before tax. Did not take the SSD upgrade as they wanted about $450 for it. Although the SSD is a new  PCLe NVMe which are significantly faster than other SSD's I was not willing to pay about 35% of the system price for it. Will wait for prices to drop and then get one. The Alienware R3 is really compact and very quiet, about 1/3rd the size of my former Dell workstation.

 

Graham

Graham,

Your insight is very helpful! Your needs seem similar to ours, we use Chief for a few house renovations and a few house designs. I think we may buy a similar computer as you from Alienware R3.

There is one on sale for presidents day:

http://deals.dell.com/productdetail/dpcwxy03hpres

what do you all think?

Would you upgrade anything here for starters?

Do you think the i7 6700k is very important, I see the current sale is for a i7 6700, no overclocking from the box?

Emily

The struggle is that Blazing Fast is a relative term when it comes to computers, it's also very challenging when a budget is involved. From the posters in this forum it is apparent that there is a wide range of users, those running smaller models such as myself for kitchen/interior design all the way up to massive models for multi-storey construction and publication quality renderings. As such, the type of system needed for the former is drastically different than what is required for the latter. It can easily be the difference between spending $1,500 or $6,000 or more per system. Users need to evaluate the type of software they use, how extensively they use it and the features they use. This needs to be taken into account along with your workflow style and set-up. Some users work on a massive Chief model, Raytrace in the background, edit high res pics in Photoshop, video edit, browse and more all at the same time. If this is your workflow situation then the reality is you are most likely into the higher $ range. For myself, I run smaller models on Chief, a raytrace in the background, MS Office and browser with the odd photo editing here and there. For this, my recently purchased $1,500 Alienware R3, Skylake 6700K, 8GB Ram and Navida GTX 745 runs everything without any sense of lag whatsoever. Given this, the only possible real gain that I could realize by spending more money would be faster Ratraces, and in order to significantly reduce these times I would have to scale up to a dual Zeon configuration which would easily cost an addition $2,000 or more than my current system.

 

Graham

we are looking to buy a desktop and cut down on some lag time on Chief x8, our files are 370mb. The lag for erasing a measurement line takes 5 seconds. Although this thread makes clear that we don't know why. rendering works just fine. we have a newish laptop that is an i7 processor. we pulled up the task manager like you said, we found it said "Chief not responding" when we erased a measurement. Any thoughts??

Also do you mind sharing more detail of your purchase? you seem like a similar user, and did you consider:

if you want to buy an SSD hard drive?

if you will expand your hard drive some day? 

unfortunately Dell has given us trouble in the past.

we've bought our last desktop from best buy, hp and added a graphics card. probably invested under $1000.

i'm researching some of these manufacturers of gaming computers Puget and Falcon Northwest, that some members here use, but they seem double the price, $2600. I wonder for the purpose of just rendering in chief, not playing games, are those overkill?

what is recommended middle of the road sizes for ram, processor, graphics card for good speed when running chief architect?

anyone researched a set up in 2015 that they recommend?( it is challenging for me to find current models to compare to good older models.)

thanks!

if there is an old thread on this topic, please advise!

where do you get a service plan in case you need repairs on the computer you bought online?

thanks, we only need this desktop computer for chief architect. Is that how you use your computer?

Where do you buy it? online from one source?

we just need the brain and graphics card, not a monitor. suggestions?

thanks!