Workstation Build - £450 ($600)

[agrieveson]

I have been asked to spec a workstation for a friend of mine. She is an Architecture student and will be using the system for work only (e.g. AutoCAD, Revit, Sketchup, Photoshop). NO over clocking, NO gaming. She has a strict budget of no more than £450 ($600) for the full build (She is moving from a laptop so has nothing).

I have built a workstation for this kind of use for myself before, but they have all been in the £2000 ($3000) range, and I have no real experience in where money is best spent on such a low end system.

The only constraint is that it will have a workstation GPU (e.g. Quadro 600).

Any UK supplier (or multiple).

What would your suggestions be?

 

[VengeanceUK]

for that sort of money its quite difficult to recommend a "decent" machine for her purposes more sort of an "average" machine territory

 

[agrieveson]

for that sort of money its quite difficult to recommend a "decent" machine for her purposes more sort of an "average" machine territory

I understand that you would not be able to get anything "decent", but to her anything will feel better than the pentium laptop she has been using...

 

[seumasbeathan]

I really don't think you can do anything that is worth it for £450

 

[Gigby101]

hi there, i'm building a workstation myself (few posts lower... i'm an architecture student too ... but my budget is, actually i should say my goal is 1200€ so about $1450... you do realize that only the quadro 600 is a little under $300, right? (by the way i personally chose the ATI FirePro V4800 which is better (IMO) and a bit cheaper)...
I personally think it would be a bit hard to make something out of $600 (but i'm not an expert).
How advanced is she in 3D modeling and rendering? can she find other solutions to save from the price, like a friend who has an old monitor? or work through the summer to raise the budget a bit? You can check my config a few posts back (it's one of the recent ones)... it's very basic (except for some parts i wanted to look good) and i still think it's not enough... it will definitely evolve trough the year.
Personally i've gone through all my years of study (i have 1 year left) with a laptop and right untill now, when i decided to do 3D for architects to make some money on the side, i've never needed more (i've used 3D's max, sketchup, artlantis, autocad, archicad, photoshop, indesign, etc, etc.)
but back to the problem,
- for the mobo look in the asus sector (P8Z77, don't know exactly which one)
- on my laptop i have a 2,66Ghz intel core i7 (a bit old) and some times it struggles
- graphics card ATI firepro V4800
- ram 8Go should be enough for now
- SSD would be great but not enough storage space (does she have an external drive?)... if not you should get 500Gb hard drive although the 1Tb ones aren't a lot more expensive

Basically i think a nice mobo and processor are the most important as the rest can easily be upgraded later

 

[seumasbeathan]

His/her friend is not overclocking so a Z77 board would be pointless, better to go H61 and save money

 

[WYP]

this list will include most of the main components of the system apart from the gpu and the os. i've tried to go as cheap as i can. the total cost is £320

cpu: Intel Core i3-2120 £92
HDD: 1TB seagate £60
budget Case £26
Optical drive £15
Ram: 8gb mushkin £36
PSU: http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Comp...500CX+V2+80PLUS+Power+Supply+?productId=42489
Motherboard: MSI B75MA-P45 Intel B75 £50

this will leave you around £130 for the gpu firepro v4800, you could save a further £15 if you go for this psu, i have used it before but can be loud under full load and has only 70% efficiency which is low by today's standards (which is why its not on the speclist above). if your need to throw in a os into that £450, id advise you try to increase the budget to accommodate. further money could be saved if you tried buying components second hand or lowering the hard drive size to 500gb.