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How to Configure a Workstation for CAD
15 Sep, 2011 By: Alex HerreraCadalyst Labs Report: Performance, longevity, value: Your next system can have it all if you know how to shop. We’re here to help.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2011 issue of Cadalyst magazine.
Let's face it: If you were to make a list of your favorite ten — or even one thousand — ways to spend your time, shopping for a new computer isn't likely to be on it. Choosing the right system for yourself or your entire department takes time, patience, and know-how and is fraught with the risk of unwisely spending an awful lot of money. And yet, you can't keep using that old clunker forever.
We're here to help. We can't promise to answer your real question, "I've got $2,000; which workstation is best for me?" There are too many variables specific to your job and your workflow to provide a black-and-white answer for anyone, let alone a universal solution to satisfy everyone. But we can provide some insight about workstation components and how they affect system performance, plus some practical guidelines to help you determine what's more important, what's less important, and how to get the most bang for your buck. You'll still need to do a fair amount of your own research, but it will be time well spent, as upgrading to a state-of-the-art machine will reap productivity dividends that will save both time and money.
In the interest of keeping this article to a manageable length, our focus this time around will be on desktop professional workstations. We won't be discussing standard PCs or mobile workstations, although much of the information shared here is universally applicable.
Now is a great time to buy a new workstation, thanks to good, old-fashioned free-market competition. On the platform side, we're seeing tremendous advances in performance per dollar and performance per watt. And the competition between the professional graphics card developers has been heating up in recent years, raising the level of graphics performance your dollars can buy.
Professional Workstations: The Benefits
What you get when you go pro.
Workstation or consumer-grade PC? What's the difference, and why should you care? Well, ten to fifteen years ago, no one had trouble distinguishing between one and the other. Workstations were very expensive, high-performance, proprietary, 3D-equipped RISC or UNIX boxes. PCs were lower-cost, lower-quality toys that couldn't handle 3D. But all that has changed.
Spurred on by technological advances funded by the huge economies of scale in the broader PC markets, workstation OEMs such as HP, Sun, and SGI got out of the component-making business, leaving that to independent hardware vendors (IHVs) such as Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. As a result, workstations today share technology with PCs and enjoy the economy-of-scale benefits that come with mass-market production.
That raises the question: If the guts of the PC and the guts of the workstation are the same, why pay a premium for the latter? Interestingly, those exorbitant workstation premiums of the past are long gone. Yes, you can still spend your entire system budget on a single high-end graphics card, but today's entry-level system — which more than 80% of desktop workstation buyers choose (according to Jon Peddie Research) — can sell for only about $100 more than a similarly configured PC. Take a look at the recently released HP Z210 and Dell Precision T1600, for example, with prices starting well below $1,000. Sidebar: "Entry-Level to High-End: What You Get for Your Workstation Dollar"
Many such entry-level models incorporate Intel's new Xeon E3 family of processors with Intel HD Graphics P3000, which offers integrated graphics processing — that is, no discrete graphics card. Although in our opinion this option is not adequate for most CAD applications, it does offer improved graphics performance compared with a standard PC. According to Wes Shimanek, workstation product manager at Intel, "If you have been buying a PC to do CAD, you'll want to rethink that investment and consider [a Xeon E3-based workstation]. This system offers you better performance for similar dollars to the PC you have been using."
Although you don't have to pay much of a premium for a workstation, there are compelling reasons to do so. There's a whole laundry list of benefits to be had, but at a minimum you'll get independent software vendor (ISV) certification, meaning your CAD software developer has tested the hardware and vouches for its reliability, and in most cases, you'll get a professional graphics card as well.
"It is important that CAD users select an ISV-certified workstation to help ensure that the demanding applications they depend on run smoothly, right out of the box," said Greg Weir, director of Precision Workstation Product and ISV Marketing at Dell. "[ISV-certified hardware] comes with supported drivers to help eliminate issues and increase performance after the point of sale. This intense level of testing and development between an OEM and the ISV only comes with workstations."
In contrast to the graphics cards sought by gamers, professional graphics processing units (GPUs) enable special rendering modes unique to CAD in general, and often to your specific application as well. Drivers from NVIDIA and AMD optimize the quality and performance for common tasks such as rendering AutoCAD Smooth lines and Gooch shaders. Try to render the same visuals on noncertified, gamer-class hardware, and AutoCAD will turn off hardware acceleration, dropping your rendering to a relative crawl.
Consideration No. 1: Software
Let the system requirements for your primary CAD application be your guide.
Where do you begin your quest for the right workstation? This particular hardware search should start with your software.
Let's be real: Nobody relies on just one application over the course of a day. We're all bouncing between disparate tasks and windows. But for the majority of CAD professionals, there is one application — or maybe a couple — that consumes the bulk of your hours at the desk. What's the app that dominates your day? Got it? Now hit the web site of the software developer and find the minimum and recommended system requirements for your killer app. AutoCAD users can find this information at http://usa.autodesk.com/autocad/system-requirements.
In most cases, an application's minimum requirements set an extremely low standard, as the software vendors begrudgingly must address the least common denominator of the installed base. We don't recommend you follow these guidelines, but it's worth making a note of the minimum graphics, system memory, and CPU requirements. On the other hand, it's highly likely that any new workstation on the market today will meet or exceed these numbers.
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