Revit as in Autodesk Revit Building?

yes.

Wow, I always thought this forum was infested with MayaRhino driven freaks. That explains my dispbelieve at first. Nice to see that not everyone is using what the starchitects use.

Anyway, I use Revit as well and got the following information from a revit forum. Hope it is any help to you.



Processor
Revit will take the best processor you can afford. Most people can pick up 3.4 Ghz Pentium 4's or even faster, but you should spread the money around on other parts of the computer, too.

Revit does NOT make use of multiple processors, but Accurender does. If you're planning on doing a lot of rendering work, two processors will save you time. But for drafting and modeling you will not see any improvement.

The amount of L2 cache depends on your budget. Pentium 4's ship with 1Mb or 2Mb of L2 cache; the 2Mb varieties give you perhaps a few percentage points better performance over the 1Mb cache.

Athlon processors are reportedly working well with Revit.

Avoid cheaper processors that have a smaller or no L2 cache, such as the Celeron and Sempron processors.

The new Centrino or Pentium-M Intel processors for laptops also work well with Revit, and are recommended for laptops given their higher efficiency and reduced heat output. Multiply a Centrino/Pentium-M's processor speed by 1.6 to find its equivalent Pentium 4 speed.

Memory
Revit is a memory hog. The rule of thumb: you're going to need 20 times the amount of RAM versus the size of your file (this ratio relates to the size of a compacted 8.1 central file). 1Gb is really the minimum you want to have if you're working on anything larger than a house. 2Gb is a safer bet, and is the useful maximum that 32-bit Windows can handle. You can read up on the 3Gb Windows boot switch that will give more RAM to applications, but it can cause stability problems for Windows.

Memory specs vary, but the faster RAM specs like 400Mhz dual channel RAM are a good choice.

Hard Drive
This is less critical since the hard drive should only be used to load the data in the first place. Yes, you can buy SCSI or SATA drives for your workstation, but this is not a real bottleneck for day-to-day use of Revit. 60Gb drives are about as small as they come -- and you don't need more than this unless you need it for your MP3 collection

If you're not sparing any expense, get a second physical drive to use for your Windows swap file, the idea being that data access and swap file access can happen concurrently. Having tried this on a couple of computers I haven't seen any difference in performance, but you might. I recommend setting the Windows swap file's minimum and maximum size to the same value (twice the value of your installed RAM) so that Windows isn't working to change the size of the file while you work.

Video Card
There are so many cards on the market, and having seen about 200 workstations running Revit, there are some consistently good cards and some consistently bad cards that have shown up. There are threads for both types in this forum.

In Revit's Options dialog box there are two checkboxes: one for Overlay Planes, and one enabling OpenGL acceleration. If your card supports it, you will get the best performance with OpenGL enabled and overlay planes disabled.

What to buy? Revit does not benefit from a high-end card... all you need is a solid video card that supports Revit's implementation of OpenGL. Integrated video, while some models do work (Intel most notably) should be avoided since it shares RAM with the main memory. Revit does not benefit from high amounts of video RAM either, and has worked happily on 32Mb of video RAM. Compatible video cards in the $100-$300 range may work just fine -- or better than cards costing much more. Don't buy a high-end card -- spend the money on more RAM!

The new PCI Express format for video cards offers higher bandwidth for moving video-related data around on your computer -- mostly for video games! Revit does not appear to benefit much (if at all) from this new standard, but you may want to consider it anyway since AGP's days are probably numbered. That said, there seems to be fewer PCI-E video cards that are compatible with Revit, but this will probably change as time goes on and as fewer AGP cards are available.

The Good
ATI FireGL V3100 (AGP or PCI-E -- the FireGL cards are really shining these days)
ATI Radeon, selected models (discontinued, but still out there)
Asus cards with nVidia chipsets (Asus is a good brand)
AOpen cards with nVidia chipsets
Chaintech and Gainward nVidia GeForce cards
Dell video cards using Dell's drivers
Some nVidia Quadro FX500 (AGP) /540 (PCI-E) models, e.g. Leadtek, Elsa, PNY, using the latest drivers
The Bad
Gigabyte cards -- all models
MSI video cards -- most models, though some users have been able to get these to work with Revit
3D Labs Oxygen cards
older ATI cards (prior to the RADEON series)
The Unknown
Given the huge number of video card brands out there, you may do well with other brands or models than those listed above. Post to this forum with your results! If you're unsure about a card that's going into a new computer, ask if you can exchange it if it doesn't work with OpenGL in Revit.

Drivers
Generally, newer is better. But in some cases, an older driver may work better than a newer one. The key is knowing exactly which manufacturer made the card and using their drivers. nVidia does NOT manufacture video cards -- they make the chips for the manufacturers. This is also the case with some ATI cards, though the majority of ATI-powered cards out there are built by ATI.

Dual Screen
Revit does not really support dual monitors, but users are noticing that 8.1 is more friendly to this configuration than previous versions of Revit.

Monitor
Resolution needs to be at least 1152 x 864 -- 1024 x 768 is really not enough.

Server and Networking
On larger projects, consider using gigabit technology for your network -- switches, network cards on all computers. The server could be equipped with dual network cards for better throughput. Your server's hard drive should be blazing fast to speed up saving and loading of the central file across the network. It should be equipped with plenty of RAM, and consider multi processor models if you can afford it.

Recently we have seen some problems with RAID-5 servers causing some minor corruption of central files, either resulting in a crash or an error requiring the save to be repeated. I would recommend another RAID flavour if it is possible.

Windows 64-bit
The main advantage with this new OS is that it can access much more RAM. For all but the largest projects this will be unnecessary, and WinXP 64 users are having trouble getting drivers to work. Over time Win64 may become the new standard, but for now it is rarely used in the workplace.

Win64 does not otherwise increase performance.