Hardware selection - Worth upgrading and what to pick?
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PvdPol, in General Q & A
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By carowe
I just bought a new desktop and two 27” monitors in December and last week signed a contract on a job out of state that will require quite a bit of travel. I am going to have to get a new laptop but really don’t want to spend a fortune at this point and don’t want to have to buy another license. Most of my work will be done in my office, but on my trips out there will need to access my CA files, and perhaps work on them. What would be the minimum requirements I would need in order to access my main computer and let it do the heavy lifting on CA? I use X11 Interiors and will primarily be working on kitchen and bathroom designs for the architect.
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By habdou
Hi,
Does anyone know how to align a vertical drawer pull (Hardware) to the right or left rather than center?
Please don't say make the drawer to a door.
Thanks
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By winglakedesign
Hello everyone,
I am about to purchase a new MacBook Pro. Mine current MacBook Pro is 2015, Intel Core i5, 2.9 GHz, 8 GB MHz, Intel Iris Graphcs 6100 1536 MB. Whatever all that means....I get the swirling rainbow often because I run Affinity Photo and Home Designer Architectural along with a few other things being open at the same time...mail, messages, etc.
So - time to upgrade. I don't know which is more important to help run programs quickly - Obviously - I would like the upgrades on all - but it's already so expensive so wondering if the combination of standard and some upgrade will be okay. I have design business and use Chief Architecture for floor plan and furniture layouts to present to clients.
1) 2.6GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.3GHz (standard) vs
2.9GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz
2) 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 (standards) memory vs.
32GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
3) Radeon Pro 560X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory (standard) vs
Radeon Pro Vega 16 with 4GB of HBM2 memory vs
Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory
I was originally thinking of doing the upgrade to the i9 intel processor - only but then someone mentioned upgrading the graphics card.
I am sticking with Mac at this time because it's what I know. Can anyone advise please? Thank you so much!
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By Walde77
I'm in the market for a travel laptop that will run Chief X +. Ideally it would be a ultrabook 2 in 1 to be able to have a tablet with me (without carrying another stand alone tablet). Does anyone have any insight or experience with Microsoft's Surface Book 2 -15" with the 1060 video card? My local custom built computer shop says all of the ultrabooks/light weight units are going to lack the power needed to run Chief effectively. Any thoughts?
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By kylejmarsh
I'm interested in building a new Mac setup for running Chief.
Currently I have a Mid-2014 Macbook Pro, 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 Cores, w/Nvidia GeForce GT 750M 2048MB GPU. This setup will run Chief Models well until they get to about 3000 SF - by 'well' I mean they are pretty lag-free in 3D mode (with optimized exterior camera i.e. cabinet, interior casing, plumbing layers 'off' to decrease total modeled polygons). I've noticed that on a recent 6000 sf project, I was often waiting for the model to 'rebuild' even getting a dialog at times - my productivity was way down, and I was frustrated (and bored at the same time - waiting for all that refresh time.) In Layout, I'm often waiting for views to refresh / render for me, especially 'plot line' views - even when I'm working with a smaller model, in order to make a set of CD's it seems that I wait just a bit too long for everything to happen - especially if this is my business. So it seems I've located a place where my current setup is lacking.
I'm committed to running a Mac - although the concepts of a setup should be similar even if you're planning a PC.
Mostly I'm using Chief to create models of homes and renovations of 1500 - 4500 sf, and to create Construction Docs from the model. I do a few renderings through the course of the process, but no video exports. Mostly I'm interested in a model that rebuilds quickly, and layout views that update quickly - and if I could eliminate that tiny lag that happens with pretty much every operation - then I'd really be happy.
What do I need Chief to do?
1. A model that rebuilds quickly
2. Layout views that update quickly
What Computer do I need to make this happen?
I'm tempted to get a Mac Pro tower from a few years ago which has twin 3GB video cards, bumping me from 2GB to 6GB. This also would have 6 cores, each running at 3.5 GHz - vs. my current 4 core / 2.5 GHz setup. I can get one of these for $1800 - so as soon as it saves me 18 hours it's all gravy after that.
In regards to the Model Rebuilding time, it seems like the video card upgrade won't do much to help my cause. From what I can gather, the model rebuilds itself using only one core, no GPU, and so is entirely dependent on the clock speed of your processor - so going from 2.5 to 3.5 would be almost a doubling, which is nice - but not the kind of gains I was hoping for (but I may just have to settle for).
// I read something recently by a Chief Programmer which said the model had to be rebuilt in a certain order, and thats why they couldn't split it across the different cores. I wonder why they can't at least split each floor level on a core, and the terrain on another core - but I'm not a coder so I can't answer why not. There's probably a good reason.
My question is - and I haven't been able to find any info about it - is what effect does the video card have on Layout Views updating?
I did some basic testing using the Activity Monitor utility, watching CPU and GPU history as wall as CPU load graphs, and got the following results:
Creating Plot Lines (Layout) seems to rely on the CPU, but seems to split the load across all the Processor Cores. So for this, I assume more cores is better, as well as processor speed. GPU seems to be idle during this process.
Working in Elevation View (actually an orthographic camera of the 3D model). Zooming in and out, the load split across processor cores.
Manipulating the model and waiting for the model to update, we also get multi-core activity, and little action on the GPU. The only time we get GPU action is when we look at things in the 3D exterior camera - standard rendering style.
So I guess that leaves me with some answers. It basically seems like:
1. The GPU isn't a big deal, and even my 2GB card is pretty good
2. More Cores + more speed are my friend. Although the graphs don't have a number, watching the percentage on the processor shows that it was hitting 100% during the layout zoom operations - so I'm out of processor.
So this changes what I buy somewhat. Guess I'm looking for Cores + Speed instead of upgrading to a massive video card. Does anyone else have insight to this?
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