I'd go i5, 8gb and the best budget bang for the buck video card. don't bother with quadro unless your work is paying or you can write it off. I haven't built a computer in many years so I'm probably useless when it comes to picking specific models.

And if you were awesome, you'd get an SSD but that might blow your budget. Still, they're reasonably priced if you get a 256 gb for your "working drive" and use the spinning platters for longer term storage.

 

Thanks, guy. Props for the advice.

Probably not gonna spring for the SSD. I have half a dozen fast but fairly small (35-65GB) drives I can take from work. Free is good.

 

But SSD is sooo good to the battery.

 

It's a desktop. My battery is the nuke plant 50 miles away.

 

You can get a work station graphics card for ~$150 bucks and the last bench mark I saw, work station cards in that price range were kicking the *** of $600 gaming cards on the cad based bench marks. And also, I'm not sure about other programs, but solid works doesnt thread very well. So a 4 ghz dual core will run solid works much faster than a 2.2ghz 4 core assuming everything else about the processors and system is the same. You do want ALL the ram, seriously, ALL the ram. My work computer still ***** a brick on big solid works assemblies and drawings and its an i7, 8gb ram, quadro equipped hp workstation. It is a slower i7 (2.4 ghz 4 core) and I'm sure the crap load of corporate bloatware on it isnt helping.

 

Ram is cheap. It's only $60 for 16GB, so you might as well spring for it if there is any chance you need it.

 

Srsly. 8gb is so 2007!

 

Srsly. 8GB is so 2007! You wants all the ram for that. 32gb of fast ram is like $150.

 

I hate all yall with DDR3. I thought it would be a good idea on the 2nd rebuild of this computer to use an AMD2+ setup because I figured DDR2 was going to get stupidly cheap (DDR3 had just come out at the time), and I was saving money at the moment by using the current AMD2 processor I had.

 

Haha. Yeah, RAM always tends to get cheaper and cheaper over time, right up until the point that the next generation form-factor is released. Once the production lines switch over to the new stuff, the remaining stock of the old parts starts to skyrocket in value.

On the plus side, even DDR2 is still insanely cheap. I can remember forking out well over a hundred bucks to upgrade my Amiga 500 from 512k to 1 meg, and that was back when money was worth something. Hell, when the price of 30 pin SIMMs dropped to $50 a meg (1 meg was achieved with 4 256k sticks) I immediately went out and bought 2 megs worth for my 486, which was a lot of RAM at the time. I remember that day very clearly.

But it's ok. DDR4 will be out in a month or two, so all of us DDR3 crew will be crying soon enough. (Hooray, no more banking requirements!)

 

Alright old man, I'll get off your lawn.

 

 

I love you guyz. No homo.

 

rambus.

 

I just speced a computer:

i7-3770
16GB of DDR3 1600MHz
2TB 7200RPM drive
32GB SSD for Cache
Radeon HD 7770

 

So true.

 

From where and at what price? I'd like to get something like I have at work, but they were well over a grand. Seeing that I'm looking for 2 at once (wife's rig is even older than mine), that's too much for the Braineack in me.

 

Dell put it together for me, it's called the XPS 8500. It should cost the company right around a grand.

 

When you say "32GB SSD for cache", do you mean you're parking the OS's page file on it?

 

yeah, i believe it's used as a scratch drive. can do 32GB or 256GB.