[Inquiry] Intel Xeon Gold 6130 , 48GB RAM, Quadro P4000- for Autodesk Design Suite

[Onzki]

Hi Everyone!

 

My office (Landscape design firm) is planning to purchase Autodesk Design Suite: Revit and 3dsMax, and also the PC workstation for such purpose.

Our IT guy suggested the specifications I mentioned in the title above- anybody have experience with this setup?

 

I have a feeling that 48GB RAM is an overkill, so I suggested to change into 32GB Ram instead,

and whatever $ savings- just upgrade the GPU to Quadro P5000 instead of P4000.

 

Do you think my suggestion makes more sense? 48GB ram-> 32GB Ram, Quadro P4000 -> Quadro P5000?

 

Thanks so much! Our office is a newbie to these programs and setup, so I really appreciate your advise.

Edited March 1, 2019 by Onzki

[Nikolaos M]

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Autodesk-Revit-171/Hardware-Recommendations

 

Could you mention the budget? I think you're going to throw money on the wrong hardware.

[Onzki]

Per machine, I think near 7-8K USD. Seems like office at this stage is willing to spend on this as long as it is guaranteed to run smoothly for Autodesk AEC bundle, particularly Revit and 3Ds Max. Project is big, like some sort of urban plaza/ park, sport center/ stadium. Now my big question is about RAM, the 48GB RAM that my IT first recommended sounds like too much in my opinion, but anyone here have long time experience with Revit and says otherwise, I'm open to any correction.

BTW, office is currently tied with using Dell system, so the choices is really limited (cannot DIY lol ). Thanks!

Edited March 4, 2019 by Onzki

[Nikolaos M]

If it has to be Dell, then look at this one https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-gaming-desktops/alienware-area-51/spd/alienware-area51-r5/dpcwcntr504s20x.

Don't be misled by the "Gaming" term in the title. This machine would be much faster in any task compared to 16c/32t Xeon based WS.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Here is the thing, even tho what @Nikolaos has proposed make seance (generally) when using CAD software such REVIT, there are some incompatibilities that occurs with GTX video cards, mostly with Open CL and Open GL codecs. That's when Quadro's video cards have an advantage. Also on 'CAD software', you work mostly with lines rather than shaded viewports so Quadros will have an advantage on that too.

 

Now, all depends on the software you will be using of course.

 

If you mainly will use REVIT or similar CAD software and 3D Max, a Quadro P4000 or P5000 would be more than enough, REVIT relies mostly on CPU anyways, so in your case getting a 'Faster' CPU would be better, Those Golden Xeons with large cores amount are very fast at rendering, doing large images or animations, but as workstation they fall behind because of the low base speed, in your case, is 2.1Ghz.

If we consider only that, then using a High-speed CPU will give you better performance, any Xeon running over 3.6 Ghz would be good or using an i9 @ 4Ghz or more would be even better.

 

RAM the more you have the better if you are planning to work on large project visualizations, then more RAM is always better, A more expensive GPU would be beneficial only while doing GPU rendering or VR.

 

I work in rather large projects too, and I don't regret having 68 Gb of RAM I have a Quadro P4000 and this performs quite well on VR too.

 

A GTX 1080 or newer would be better, but since DELL is so obtuse with their computer's specs I had to choose what works better overall for us. At the time I purchase our machines, i7 didn't support more than 32 Gb on RAM and we could not get Quadros with i7 Machines, Then we choose a similar performance Xeon and that give us more expansion possibilities on RAM, 758 Gb I believe.

 

Having said that Xeon Gold series are expensive CPU anyways, if your company really want to invest on Visualization I would recommend to get a nice workstation machine, as mentioned anything over 3.6Ghz CPU a Quadro P4000 or better lost of RAM, and if you have more money left, then buy render nodes, in that case, that Golden Xeon would be perfect, no need for fancy video card, if you are not doing GPU rendering. This way you can submit to render and keep working on something else your boss will love that .

[Scott Dombrowski]

We just went through this exercise. I use the machine for 3ds Max and VR development, so I needed something with good single core speeds as well as a good video card. We do our leases through Dell, and I spec'ed a Precision 5820 with a i9-9980XE (18 cores, 3.0GHz), 64GB of RAM, and a 2080ti video card. The 2080ti was not an option in the normal build, so we ordered that separate. This was cheaper than a Precision 7920 with dual Xeon Gold 5122 (4 cores 3.6GHz) with the same RAM and video. On paper, the Xeon has a higher clock speed than the i9, but the single core benchmark of the i9 is higher than the Xeon. I think this has to do with the number of instructions per cycle each CPU can handle, but someone with more knowledge on that subject will have to chime in on that.

 

Total price was around $7100, but it won't be here for a few weeks so I can't give any feedback on it yet, but I expect the i9 with 2080ti to be quite the upgrade over my current dual Xeon E5-2637 and 980ti. My current dual Xeon does the Vray benchmark in about 1:40. The dual Xeon Gold is at 1:21, and the i9 9980xe is between :30-:37. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all my new free time.

[Onzki]

Thanks everyone for sharing some insights, really helpful. Dell marketing is really good placing their Alienware vs "Pro" Workstation head to head.. and Autodesk website specifications recommendation don't shed any bias on i9 vs Xeon's haha, giving me headache lol Thanks especially for mentioning about the RAM, now I know that 48GB is not an overkill but in the median these days, especially when we're looking to rely on this build for next 3-5 years.