Professional Workstation or Consumer Gaming Graphics?

For many CAD software companies, certified workstation graphics cards are recommended for the best performance. While this specification isn’t a necessity for the applications to run, they may have a significant upper hand compared to consumer-level and gaming graphics cards due to professional drivers being installed on the cards. In some cases, the name on the label and the drivers applied are the only differences between a $100 gaming GPU vs. a $400 workstation GPU. In some instances, however, available pipelines, shader clock speeds, and accuracy in rendering geometry can be tangible improvements when going with the professional graphics card.

Deciding between the two still causes frustration and there isn’t much real world proof to research or work from in determining any substantial improvement in performance for the added cost. While workstation cards certainly work better on CAD and database calculations compared to games (and vis versa with the gaming graphics cards), is the additional investment really worth it? I don’t have a good answer for that. Let me give you a simple solution anyway: If you are purchasing a business-class workstation, it will be coming bundled with a workstation graphics card and if you are buying a consumer-grade gaming machine for your CAD work, it almost definitely has a gaming GPU installed – so don’t sweat it!

Deciphering the Graphics Card Naming Game

There are many tricks companies play when coming up with a name for a product. AMD and nVidia are no different. Subtle differences in card numbers, letters, and price can actually mean huge differences in performance. The graphic below (originally from geforce.com and picked up from lifehacker.com) is just a brief introduction to how confusing the GPU names are:

This is just a sampling from nVidia’s desktop consumer and workstation graphics cards, not to mention how confusing it can become when you introduce their mobile GPU’s for notebooks. And while this following image doesn’t show the performance of each card, you can tell the naming scheme used by AMD is only a little easier to understand:

The typical practice nVidia and AMD use for their mobile cards is simply adding an “m” (for mobile) to the beginning or end of the card number, but that doesn’t mean it will perform the same as it’s desktop equivalent. This is where you have to be very careful. For a full explanation of GPU performance numbers and a comparison of cards worth looking into, check back soon for the next Indydrafter CAD Hardware post on graphics cards.

At the crux of the issue, it isn’t feasibly possible to fit a mobile workstation with desktop caliber components. There is no wiggle room here. It is just a fact. Take a look at desktop processors compared to those available for notebooks – there is a major difference in speed, cache, power draw, and number of cores. These same comparisons can be made about graphics cards. However, when it comes to the quality of the motherboard (chipset), available ports, hard drive/solid state drive, memory (RAM), and optical drives little sacrifice needs to be made, if any at all. This is important, as more and more professionals are on the move, out in the field, and take work home with them.

Mobile Processors

When it comes to speed, reliability, power consumption, and availability, Intel has a huge upper hand over AMD. So much so that I’m not going to even discuss AMD CPU’s in this article. It isn’t that they are poor quality or that I’m unfamiliar with them, it is just the fact you’d be taking a wrong turn out of the gates if you went with an AMD chip in a mobile workstation when Intel performs so much better and its ubiquity makes complimentary components less expensive.

With that said, the Intel Sandy Bridge mobile processors have been available since the beginning of this year. They are a significant upgrade from the previous generation in speed, cache, advanced Turbo Boost capabilities, power consumption, and even price. The standard fare CPU in many mid-to-high end consumer notebooks and entry level mobile workstations is the Intel Core i7-2630QM processor (2 GHz Quad Core w/ 6 MB L3 Cache). This CPU is likely powerful enough for daily CAD design and basic modeling capabilities. You may find it can do much more, but with most CAD applications only taking advantage of a single processor core, there’s only so much you can squeak out of this chip (even with Turbo Boost focusing up to 2.9 GHz speeds to a single core when under heavy loads).

The Core i7 chip line rounds out with the 2720QM (2.2 GHz w/ 6 MB L3 Cache), 2820QM (2.3 GHz w/ 8 MB L3 Cache), and 2920XM (2.5 GHz w/ 8 MB L3 Cache) all sporting Turbo Boost technology allowing a single core to get around a 30-40% jump in performance on heavy calculations. At a price point of about $1k above the 2630Qm, the 2920Xm processor knocks the budget out of the park and I would be skeptical buying it at all due to the heat it will generate, power drain, and lack of return on investment from performance.

Those that keep up with gadget news will know there are also Core i3 and Core i5 versions of the Intel Sandy Bridge chips, but these tend to be quite underwhelming under anything above basic tasks on modern CAD applications.

The Verdict

From my pricing, testing, and scrutinizing, it appears the Core i7 2720QM CPU is the best of the bunch when comparing performance vs. price. Given an extra $100-150 in budget or savings in another component category, though, the 2820QM processor is desirable with the extra cache and significant jump in Turbo Boost allocation.

Special Note

Intel is rumored to release several (9) new Sandy Bridge mobile processors very soon. These are apparently going to be a little better in performance compared to the current line and have slightly higher clocked HD 3000 graphics. I would guess they’ll be similarly priced between the 26xx, 27xx, and 28xx series, so it should be a pretty easy choice on new notebooks.

My article, “Collaboration in a Multi-Disciplinary/Multi-Firm Environment,” goes in depth on different methods of saving, exporting, modifying, and sharing Civil 3D files with other software users such as older versions, vanilla AutoCAD (and AutoCAD LT), AutoCAD WS for the web and mobile platform, and Navisworks.

There is a small discrepancy in the article. In a set of images comparing two different file sizes, the same image was used twice where there should have been over a 50% increase in file size. Not a big issue, but it certainly doesn’t properly illustrate the concern I was trying to represent. Give it a read, soak it all in, and come back here to leave a comment and let me know what you thought of it. Thanks!

Last year at AU I was a lab assistant for 2 classes, attended a bunch more, took part in the Blogger and AEC socials, and worked the Avatech Solutions / IMAGINiT Technologies booth. If you were there, I may have seen you and so the reverse. This year, I’ve been lucky enough to have 2 class proposals selected to instruct! So, if you are heading out to Autodesk University 2011 in Las Vegas, make sure to check out the classes listed below that I’ll be presenting. To make it a little easier, once you’ve registered for the conference and are signing up for classes, just find the name “Bryan Tanner” in the instructor pull-down list to find my classes.

Discovering what your version of Autodesk software, or a version you plan on upgrading to, requires of your workstation is a simple Google search away. I’ll make it a little easier, though. Below are the system requirement pages for Autodesk’s major 2012 products and a resource link for future reference in finding support topics on Autodesk software:

• AutoCAD
• Map 3D
• Civil 3D
• Autodesk Revit Architecture
• Autodesk Revit MEP
• Inventor
• Navisworks
• 3Ds Max
• Autodesk Support Resource Link

Processor and Operating System

Looking through these requirements and recommendations you should start to see quite a trend: High CPU speed, lots of RAM, and a certified workstation graphics card. 64-bit programs require more resources, but the extra cost is well worth it given the additional computing performance shown in review-after-review. Not that there’s much of a choice any more. Pretty much any new workstation (and most bought within the last 2-3 years) already have a 64-bit capable processor and Windows Professional 64-bit is becoming more the norm rather than the exception.

Memory (RAM)

Memory (RAM) is becoming a major commodity these days as its price has fallen dramatically and motherboards are manufactured to accept more slots with higher capacities and faster chipsets. That’s a good thing, too. Most of Autodesk’s latest offerings are very RAM-hungry with users of complex Revit models even being suggested to work with 16 GB+ of memory on their machines . At the time of this writing, there are numerous desktop motherboards which can accept more than this quantity of RAM, only 3 notebooks that I’m aware of, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit won’t even recognize more that 16 GB of memory (better than the 3 GB limit of 32-bit operating systems!).

Graphics/Video Card

Graphics cards have always been the talk of the town when it comes to CAD workstations. Autodesk (and many other CAD developers) recommend certified workstation cards which cost 2-3 times more than their gaming equivalent. Although these graphics cards may be built on the same platform, workstation cards may have more shader pipelines opened up and higher clocked processor cores, as well as proper drivers for Direct3D, OpenGL, OpenCL, and CUDA drivers.

These differences are what make workstation cards work better for CAD geometry and database calculations compared to gaming graphics cards; they are also what make them much more expensive. Are they worth the extra money? I’ll leave that up to the people with dozens of machines to test repeatedly with billions of calculations. My opinion? Decide whether you intend to purchase a business-level workstation or a consumer grade computer and get the best video card you can within your budget (best != most expensive).

Hard Drive/Storage

Although Autodesk doesn’t mention much along the lines of storage drives aside from free space, faster is better. There are 5400, 7200, and 10k RPM Hard Disk Drives and Solid State Drives with read/write speeds which vary drastically. Solid State Drives (SSD) are newer technology which is finally starting to drop in price a little, but is well beyond what most consider affordable for their computer purchasing needs. They are much faster, but they are also very misunderstood and earlier/entry level models aren’t much of a performance jump compared to a 7200 or 10k RPM Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

What matters the most when dealing with Autodesk software requirements and recommendations is that you have plenty of free space (8 GB+ at the absolute minimum) available on the storage drive you are using and it is running error free. Storage drives are one of the most common components to fail on computers and carry the most value after use – you did back all your data up to a server or external hard drive before it failed, right? Get a 7200 RPM HDD for affordable storage at a decent speed and a small (80-128 GB) SSD to install your OS and CAD software on for quick starts and fast load times without breaking the bank…so long as you have 2 storage drive bays to take advantage of.

Wrap-Up

Buying a CAD workstation to fit the needs of your software is always a bit of a mystery. You know what the requirements and recommendations are for this release of the software, but what about next year? Or the year after that? Remember you are buying this hardware to work for you with little-to-no upgrades necessary for about 3 years.

Purchasing a bottom-feeder now will leave some money in your wallet, but have you crying later when a 600MB Revit model won’t load. Going over-the-top may help you keep your sanity a few years from now working with huge CAD files, but you may still be broke from the home equity loan you took out in the process. Finding a great sale/promotion or an average workstation which has easy-to-upgrade components is the ideal way to go. We’ll explore more on this as the 2011 Indydrafter CAD Hardware series continues.

Below, you will find a list and links for all the posts I wrote on the Civil Solutions Blog. I won’t repost them here, as Google tends to fault you in the search results if it finds duplicate content, and I just think it would be better ethically to send you where the posts were originally published. So with no further ado, here they are:

• Label Curb Elevations the Easy Way In Civil 3D – 2/16/2011
• Upload, View, and Share DXF Files in Google Docs – 2/23/2011
• Get Rid of Those Pesky Contour Label Lines – 3/2/2011
• Getting Started with Civil 3D Reports – 3/9/2011
• View Civil 3D Drawings in Other Applications – 3/15/2011
• Customize Your Civil 3D Reports – 3/18/2011
• Protecting Your Civil 3D Styles – 3/21/2011
• Discover Topobase Tools Within Map 3D 2012 - 3/22/2011
• Life is Suite! Autodesk Infrastructure Design Suites are Here – 3/22/2011
• The Civil 3D 2012 Version Comparison Matrix – 3/22/2011
• The Map 3D 2012 Version Comparison Matrix – 3/22/2011
• Pipe Network Staking in Civil 3D – 6/19/2011
• Pipe Network Staking in Civil 3D – Part 2 – 6/16/2011
• Change Parcel Area Units – 6/23/2011
• Civil 3D Subassembly Composer All Grown Up – 7/7/2011
• AutoCAD and Civil 3D Updates and Hotfixes – 7/14/2011

Let’s establish some ground rules

I’m going to make several assumptions along the way in writing these posts. One of these assumptions will include an approximate budget of $1,500-$1,800 for your CAD machine. From my experience in purchasing, building, and working with clients on their hardware, this seems to be the “sweet spot” most people fall into when planning their next workstation purchase. Your particular scenario may be different, swinging from as low as $1k to as high as a $3.5k beast, but you can still utilize these posts to set expectations of downgrading or upgrading particular components (or even entire machines) that I list.

How often should this be brought up?

The second thing to consider when reading this series, and something you should consider practicing, is the assumption that hardware purchases are held within about a 3 year cycle. In my personal opinion, 2-2.5 years between CAD workstation upgrades is ideal for money spent vs. yields on improved performance. I realize, though, that many people and firms can’t or won’t purchase new machines until 3, 4, or even 5 years have gone by. It is an overused phrase, but don’t be “penny wise and pound foolish” when it comes to your hardware. One third of your life (or your employees’ lives) are spent working behind these machines and you want them to be as effective and proficient running your CAD flavor of choice as possible. When I say “them,” I mean both the employee and the workstation as coming to a screeching halt in the middle of your workday due to hardware inadequacies can be a major downer in morale. Your biggest investment in CAD work of any sort is time. Wasting too much time on poor hardware can have much graver effects on your bottom line than a $1.5k investment every couple of years (there’s also an argument to be made regarding this for software training).

You have options

I know there are a lot of other posts, reviews, opinion articles, and forum threads dedicated to this topic; which brings me to my last point. Go ahead an read everything out there. Someone may have better insight on certain hardware topics than I do and vis versa. However, I’m going to attempt to put together some really comprehensive information on what you could, should, or shouldn’t spend your money on.

As a primer, you should read my post on Civil 3D 2011 workstations. What’s to come in this guide will be in much greater depth and will simplify the workstation buying process, including giving examples of configured mobile and desktop workstations.

What’s to come?

In the next post, this will include going in depth on the system requirements and recommendations for all major Autodesk software packages including applications within the Infrastructure, Building, and Product design suites. I’ll follow that up with a breakdown on what different workstation hardware components do and how they can drastically affect your performance. Then we’ll address some pre-configured workstation notebook options you should keep an eye out for. Next will come the desktop variant of manufactured desktop workstations.

As you might tell, there will be a lot of research, testing, and writing going into this series. I want to best serve you, the readers, in making your next CAD workstation purchase as simple and straightforward as possible. I’m not going to stop there, though, as I’ll go into greater details on picking hardware for building your own CAD beast as a reasonable price, assist in deciding what size and type of monitors you should be looking at, how to make cheap and effective upgrades to your existing hardware, and even go so far as discussing input devices like keyboards and mice.

Make a suggestion

This is going to be fun. I hope you feel the same way. If you have any subjects or components you’d like me to discuss in depth, please leave a comment below and I’d be happy to address it with a quick response or write up a post if there is enough to be said regarding the topic. Stay tuned for the coming deluge of CAD hardware geekery!

The 3 methods for generating your survey staking file covered in this post will include copy/paste plus cleanup from the Panorama, using the Pipe Network Alignment for generating a point file for just the horizontal data, or taking the extra step to include pipe/structure invert vertical data utilizing Feature Lines. All these will be covered in addition to several differing options available along the way. That makes this quite the novel of a blog post, but the process can be quite simple if you just pick out the method and options you prefer.

First things first, go ahead and draw your pipe network in the project if you haven’t already.

With the pipe network created, use the Civil 3D alignment tools to “Create Alignment from Network Parts.”

Select the first and last structures in your pipe network (or any and all structures that bound the network) and hit to create the alignment. Define the alignment however you wish with whatever styles and naming options apply for your standards.

When you are done, select “OK” and it will bring you directly into the “Create Profile…” dialog. From here, sample the proper alignment and surface to create the profile for the pipe network. Select “Draw in profile view” and choose the options within the profile view creation dialog that apply to your standards (creating the profile and profile view are unnecessary for the purpose of creating a survey staking file, but is included as an assumed step most will take during design).

With all the items sampled and style options chosen, place the profile view in your drawing. Even without the profile, we can already use the alignment created to generate Civil 3D COGO points based off of the alignment geometry or vertexes for the structure locations and rim elevations.

As an alternative, it is possible to use the structure and pipe information within Civil 3D to create an NEZ point file without having to generate COGO points. The following steps will explore this opportunity, but it will be up to you to determine if it is a worthwhile or preferred process.

From the pipe network layout tools, select the “Pipe Network Vistas” button to open up the Civil 3D Panorama.

From the structures tab of the panorama (and subsequently the pipes tab for invert information), highlight all rows of information, right-click, and select “Copy to clipboard” from the short cut menu.

Open up Microsoft Excel and paste the copied information into the spreadsheet. From here you can remove any columns and rows that don’t contain coordinate or elevation information.

With the spreadsheet “cleaned up” you can save it out to a .csv file for uploading to a data collector. (Alternatively, you can save it to any number of available formats, so long as it is a compatible file type.)

When the file is saved, you can open it in Notepad to review the results and check the accuracy. It should look like a standard NEZ point file as does the example below.

Regardless of using alignment geometry to generate COGO points in Civil 3D for export or copying and pasting structure information from the panorama, you should get the desired results for coordinate information for staking. If you don’t copy the invert coordinate and elevation information from the panorama, however, we still have to explore how to do so within Civil 3D using intelligent objects and automated point creation.

First, create a feature line along your pipe network. You can create it from an alignment (as I’ll show) or use the “Create Feature Line” option to draw the geometry. Using the alignment automates the process a bit upfront, but requires some cleanup on the backend. Drawing the feature line geometry is a more manual process, but eliminates the need to remove extraneous vertices (otherwise known as PI’s for feature lines).

For creating the feature line from an alignment, define the feature line styles and settings.

Make sure to set any weeding factors (if any at all) and select “OK”.

With the feature line created (whether from the alignment or manually drawn geometry) select the pipe network profile view and choose the “Project Objects To Profile View” option from the contextual ribbon.

Pick the feature line from the drawing space.

Confirm the projection style for the objects. This is mostly irrelevant as we are just using the feature line as a guide, not for displaying on construction documents.

If you produced the feature line from the alignment with a dynamic link, make sure to go into the feature line properties dialog and uncheck the box for “Dynamic Link”. This will allow you to adjust the elevation of the feature line separately from the alignment.

If you generated the feature line from the alignment and applied any weeding factors, you may still have some cleanup on the feature line. This isn’t entirely necessary, but will reduce the amount of manual editing you’ll have to perform to remove the COGO points that would otherwise be created between structures. In that, select the feature line and select the “Delete PI” icon from the contextual ribbon and follow the prompts at the command line and remove the intermediate vertices between structures.

From the example below, you can see what the feature line looks like once it has been modified.

With the feature line vertices limited to just the structures, pan down to the pipe network profile view and select the feature line (which should line up with the existing grade elevations of each structure).

Begin grip editing the feature line within the profile view to match the invert elevations of the pipes. If there is a drop in the influent and effluent inverts and you want that to be represented within your pipe staking points, you will have to add PI’s to your feature line to accommodate enough vertices within each structure to account for the pipe inverts.

Once the feature line elevations have been adjusted in the profile view, go to the “Create Points” toolbar or the points dropdown within the “Home” ribbon tab and select the “Automatic” point creation method within the “Miscellaneous” category.

You will then be prompted to select the geometry you want to generate the COGO points along, which in this case will be the feature line we have adjusted both horizontally and vertically.

After the feature line has been selected, you will be asked to give the COGO points a description. Type the raw description within the command line and hit several times until that description has been applied to all the COGO points generated along the feature line vertexes.

With the points created, make sure they have been added to a point group or create a point group to include these pipe network points. These could be combined into the same point group as COGO points generated from the alignment geometry to represent the structure locations and rim elevations.

Reviewing the pipe invert points in the drawing, you can see from the image below that the elevation of the structure invert is several feet below the existing ground elevation directly next to the structure. This is a quick visual check to ensure that the point was generated properly.

After all structure rim and invert points have been created, select the point group from the Prospector tab of the Toolspace, right-click, and choose “Export Points” from the shortcut menu. You will now have a pipe network staking file for uploading to your data collector.