I will be attending New School of Architecture + Design in a month. I would like to build my own computer so that I dont have to be on campus to do classwork, internship work and what not.
If anyone could help me out with building a computer with the main components that I will need, the help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you everyone!
Sep 13, 14 12:22 pm
Whatever the minimum specs are that the school requires, double the RAM, use a video card with twice the GPU computing power the lowest minimum specs and if possible twice the video memory. In other words, it's going to be a computer that is over $1000. You'll need something that is high end gaming and workstation use level. A computer that will make a competent gaming computer for the most newest video games at maximum settings and be smooth. Since the computer should be competent to serve you for 3 years becase by then it will be a low end computer. Moore's law is technology doubles every 18 months. Which means, a computer that is $2000 today would be a $1000 computer in 18 months and a $500 computer at the 36 months mark.
This means, your hardware specs is going to probably be around $2500. Software will be additional. Load it with free software that can do your work. Don't spend thousands of dollars on software until you need to and can afford it or be gotten as part of courses.
I doubt you'll have the budget for a $10,000 computer hardware.... at least not right away.
Otherwise, your hardware is going to be somewhat sluggish and low end and have performance issues.
Just buy whatever off the shelf that is about one step under the top price/most current model and you will be fine. Spending $2500 is not necessary, neither is some super custom build-out. I work with some huge Revit files and heavy renderings the computer I am using is $900/dell at costco and works fine. You will get all your software through your school connections for free (cracked).
Sep 13, 14 6:31 pm ·
·
If you are going to work alot on your own computer than you need the computing power. If you are going to use the school's workstations then no. The killer is the rendering which wll consume 90-100% of your computer's processing power if it is going to get done in any reasonable time frame considering the rendering level is to produce rendered images on the highest rendering setting which is what students do... invariably and that it takes 3 entire days to render one image.
I've seen people use up 3 of these Apple Mac workstations rendering for 3 days straight just to render one image.
Sure, a $900 computer might work today but you'll have to replace in in Oh.... 18 months. In the time frame you are at the college, you will have to replace your computer 3 times. Which is going to cost you closer to $3000 because of annual inflation. But basically $2800-$3000 is likely what you'll end up spending. For a computer that you'll be using for work as well.... you need something a little better. If you got an internship (where you are paid), you got the money.
BTW: We can't be officially promoting a criminal act that can result in being put in federal prison. Copyright infringement / piracy is a federal crime. You should be careful about openly stating something like that.
Word of advice, be careful of suggesting piracy because illegal copies is piracy under law. It is also grounds for expulsion from a university so I would advise that should not be publically spoken in the open public medium.
As far as having the right hardware level that will be serving ones needs for 3-5 years... you need something competent and capable because the university demands heavy resource consuming software. You'll need lots of hard drive space and so forth.
A $2500 computer is nothing if you got a $31K income from internship besides the money coming from financial aid grants, scholarships and loans.
Sep 13, 14 7:34 pm ·
·
If you got a job, invest in a computer that will serve you for a few years not constantly buy a new computer every 18 months because that is costly and you have limited space.
Why have to worry about your computer not having acceptable performance you need by the time you graduate?
The $900 will pretty much have the top-line quad-core processor and enough cushion room to drop in something extra and get working. Honestly, I feel the days of having a powerful individual desktop still cranking out work instead of outsourcing it to distributed networks, specialized parallel computing, or some cloud service is grossly inefficient.
You'll likely have to replace that $2500 machine in 24 or 27 months, which isn't so far from 18 (arbitrary values anyways). Intel's Sandy Bridge is still quite speedy if tweaked and that is almost six years old. In an ideal world where software is always at the bleeding edge and optimized for cores, there would be significant gains every product iteration. But now it's mostly 5-10% per core, translating to seconds faster. The biggest strides made are on the storage side or graphics and display because even though Moore's Law means a doubling of transistors leading to improved performance, constantly shrinking a processor is hard and expensive. Not so much for things where you just add more or stack on.
There's going to be some part that is obsolete by next year on a budget or expensive machine. With uncertainty, I wouldn't suggest splurging this early. A compromise would be like $1500, a fair investment but not one that'll be too costly to replace our upgrade when needed.
Sep 13, 14 8:35 pm ·
·
You're needing a good monitor.... that is part of the computer.
The point is not that the computer is competent for the software 4-5 years from now. To be honest, computers are obsolete before they are on the store shelves. It's not the AMIGA where you had a computer 10 years ahead of the game for under $1000.
Sep 14, 14 12:24 am ·
·
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Architectural Computer Specs.
Hello Forum!
I will be attending New School of Architecture + Design in a month. I would like to build my own computer so that I dont have to be on campus to do classwork, internship work and what not.
If anyone could help me out with building a computer with the main components that I will need, the help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you everyone!
Whatever the minimum specs are that the school requires, double the RAM, use a video card with twice the GPU computing power the lowest minimum specs and if possible twice the video memory. In other words, it's going to be a computer that is over $1000. You'll need something that is high end gaming and workstation use level. A computer that will make a competent gaming computer for the most newest video games at maximum settings and be smooth. Since the computer should be competent to serve you for 3 years becase by then it will be a low end computer. Moore's law is technology doubles every 18 months. Which means, a computer that is $2000 today would be a $1000 computer in 18 months and a $500 computer at the 36 months mark.
This means, your hardware specs is going to probably be around $2500. Software will be additional. Load it with free software that can do your work. Don't spend thousands of dollars on software until you need to and can afford it or be gotten as part of courses.
I doubt you'll have the budget for a $10,000 computer hardware.... at least not right away.
Otherwise, your hardware is going to be somewhat sluggish and low end and have performance issues.
Just buy whatever off the shelf that is about one step under the top price/most current model and you will be fine. Spending $2500 is not necessary, neither is some super custom build-out. I work with some huge Revit files and heavy renderings the computer I am using is $900/dell at costco and works fine. You will get all your software through your school connections for free (cracked).
If you are going to work alot on your own computer than you need the computing power. If you are going to use the school's workstations then no. The killer is the rendering which wll consume 90-100% of your computer's processing power if it is going to get done in any reasonable time frame considering the rendering level is to produce rendered images on the highest rendering setting which is what students do... invariably and that it takes 3 entire days to render one image.
I've seen people use up 3 of these Apple Mac workstations rendering for 3 days straight just to render one image.
Sure, a $900 computer might work today but you'll have to replace in in Oh.... 18 months. In the time frame you are at the college, you will have to replace your computer 3 times. Which is going to cost you closer to $3000 because of annual inflation. But basically $2800-$3000 is likely what you'll end up spending. For a computer that you'll be using for work as well.... you need something a little better. If you got an internship (where you are paid), you got the money.
BTW: We can't be officially promoting a criminal act that can result in being put in federal prison. Copyright infringement / piracy is a federal crime. You should be careful about openly stating something like that.
Word of advice, be careful of suggesting piracy because illegal copies is piracy under law. It is also grounds for expulsion from a university so I would advise that should not be publically spoken in the open public medium.
As far as having the right hardware level that will be serving ones needs for 3-5 years... you need something competent and capable because the university demands heavy resource consuming software. You'll need lots of hard drive space and so forth.
A $2500 computer is nothing if you got a $31K income from internship besides the money coming from financial aid grants, scholarships and loans.
If you got a job, invest in a computer that will serve you for a few years not constantly buy a new computer every 18 months because that is costly and you have limited space.
Why have to worry about your computer not having acceptable performance you need by the time you graduate?
The $900 will pretty much have the top-line quad-core processor and enough cushion room to drop in something extra and get working. Honestly, I feel the days of having a powerful individual desktop still cranking out work instead of outsourcing it to distributed networks, specialized parallel computing, or some cloud service is grossly inefficient.
You'll likely have to replace that $2500 machine in 24 or 27 months, which isn't so far from 18 (arbitrary values anyways). Intel's Sandy Bridge is still quite speedy if tweaked and that is almost six years old. In an ideal world where software is always at the bleeding edge and optimized for cores, there would be significant gains every product iteration. But now it's mostly 5-10% per core, translating to seconds faster. The biggest strides made are on the storage side or graphics and display because even though Moore's Law means a doubling of transistors leading to improved performance, constantly shrinking a processor is hard and expensive. Not so much for things where you just add more or stack on.
There's going to be some part that is obsolete by next year on a budget or expensive machine. With uncertainty, I wouldn't suggest splurging this early. A compromise would be like $1500, a fair investment but not one that'll be too costly to replace our upgrade when needed.
You're needing a good monitor.... that is part of the computer.
The point is not that the computer is competent for the software 4-5 years from now. To be honest, computers are obsolete before they are on the store shelves. It's not the AMIGA where you had a computer 10 years ahead of the game for under $1000.
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