Help on building a CAD rig

[LaloHao]

So first of all i guess i gotta apologize i realize theres too many of this threads but all of them are for gaming purposes and i really dont know if that would work for me so i wanted to ask for help

Basically i want a computer for school; i do a lot of 3D designing (SolidWorks, AutoCAD), programming (PICS, MCUs, i might need a serial port for better compatibility but i dont know if its even sold anymore) and lots of calculus(Matlab, Scientific Workplace), PCB manufacturing to (Eagle and Proteus specially when i want to auto route paths it stresss a lot my laptop, or at least it used to before i effd the hdd)

Sorry for my bad grammer im using a tf101 as last resource for searching for good build, my budget would be i guess from 500-1k but it really doesnt have to get to the top, i mostly dont gam, if so maybe like a day a week at most

Help is really appreciated i dont know much about this subject but id like to learn

[*BlackFox]

Sorry can't help you, as I never had a laptop.. lulz

[CrimsonNuker]

Dunno much about these builds, but I would assume a good processor (i7 3770?) with 2 good hard drives set up on RAID0? Sound like the jist of it

[Toast]

Good amount of RAM, a 6 core processor might not be a bad idea, but 4 cores would work fine too. I assume you'll be using AutoCAD, Inventor, etc, and those can be pretty RAM/processor intensive. That said, what I built for gaming (AMD x6, 8gb of RAM when I first started using those programs, 12 now) runs them fine. A small SSD might not be a bad idea for just the programs, because the startup time for AutoCAD on a HD, at least mine, is awful.

[[SD]Master_Wong]

for school or for university two very different things, as for a rig processor is less important you need a lot of graphical power to render the better res pictures that comes from a good gpu, i5 processor but throw in a good 670gtx nvidia card and atleast 8gb ram or more deffo not less, ssd for sure but either way you shouldnt need top of the line for school hell most uni's wont need top of the line im building a good computer to replace a very old one

[Love]

Tomshardware, Google it. No need to keep up to date.

[Mirosuke]

That build sounds like past $1k

[LaloHao]

Currently looking up at tomshardware is i5-3350p a good choice?

What im thinking http://pcpartpicker.com/p/zDOa dont know if its too much

edit: does the kind of motherboard depends if i can directly use a serial connection? Dont want to have to use usb2serial converter, theres too many compatibility issues

Edit2 does this make any sense? http://pcpartpicker.com/p/zE1z

[Gaigemasta]

sadly most CAD software still only used the cpu or CUDA for rendering (which Nvidia cards don't put out as raw performance as a AMD card but AMD uses OpenCL.) I would get a beefy xeon cpu and a tesla card (I usually don't support buying these but they usually have better CUDA support and raw performance than their consumer counterpart.)

edit:
Oh I just saw the budget.

Try AMD/AMD if your software supports OpenCL

[LaloHao]

sadly most CAD software still only used the cpu or CUDA for rendering (which Nvidia cards don't put out as raw performance as a AMD card but AMD uses OpenCL.) I would get a beefy xeon cpu and a tesla card (I usually don't support buying these but they usually have better CUDA support and raw performance than their consumer counterpart.)

edit:
Oh I just saw the budget.

Try AMD/AMD if your software supports OpenCL

Indeed what you just said, just looked up and SolidWorks doesn't support GPU processing, so i guess i will be switching graphic cards

EDIT: and processor (?), currently trying to find a good combo

[Gaigemasta]

Definitely get an i7 with multi-threading, and get the best model for the price "don't cut corners on the CPU" don't pick an i5 or something because this is where raw performance matters. A lot a of times in gaming a high end model CPU won't perform much different than a mid range CPU. In this case it's a different story