Which Hardware I Do Need For CAD ?
Q: Iīm a student from Germany and I want to by a new Computer, but I donīt know which hardware ( which graphic- card, AMD or Pentium,128MB Ram or more,SCSI or IDE etc.) I do need for CAD ? (by the way: of course I do not have as much money as a large company !!!!)
A: .you're sure to get many opinions on this, so I'll start with my $0.02CDN and you can use that as a start. Firstly, you can do CAD on almost any computer, so your wallet should be your guiding factor. I would recommend getting a cheap Intel Celeron chip for your CPU. They generally run at about half the cost of a true PIII or PII of equivalent speed, and the performance decline is generally quite little. In benchmark tests performed by Tom's Hardware Guide, the PII-500 is barely ahead of the Celeron-500, with the Celeron actually outperforming the PII in certain tests (!!). The Celeron 500 is about half the cost of the PII-500. As far as AMD goes, I use AMD myself and have for years, but the Celeron is a good deal right now and has good performance and guaranteed (??) compatibility. If you buy AMD, you must at least get something from the Athlon family of CPUs. For RAM, I would suggest 64mb for Windows98, 128mb for NT4.0 or 2000 as a minimum. I would get a good motherboard that you can upgrade at a later date to a faster chip...Abit and Asus are two that I like, Gigabyte is also pretty good. Video card selection is a little tougher for me, since I mostly