I love the Black, and I love most Intel SSDs - but (again, IMHO) using the HD by itself and a tiny SSD is not the choice in my office or pretty much anyone I know. We run our CAD apps in Windows 8 or 10 Pro, the 64-bit editions, and our apps can use as much RAM that's available. More RAM really won't help you here as the OS won't take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM and then the OS will be looking for HD space for RAM swap space, which really bogs down the speed of your PC. You're using 8GB, and I'm now guessing that you're using a 32-bit version of Windows. You'd be spending US$350+ to update your processor in a PC that wouldn't really take advantage of the new speed. Now that I've looked over the specs a bit more, you're using a mid-range Ivy Bridge processor that was designed in 2011 and available in 2012, and the i5-3570K was barely an improvement over its predecessor from 2 years earlier - and there aren't any decent newer i7 processors that I'm aware of that will fit into Intel's LGA1155 socket - Intel moved on with the newer architectures a couple of years ago. Your current PC is an older, mid-range (in 2012) PC that was not designed for use as a CAD or production machine - in my office, I would call your PC a "door stop" as in the only task we would use it for is to hold open a door I am not being disrespectful here - renders that are taking your PC 20-30 minutes would likely take 2-3 minutes (maximum) on a newer, optimized PC or iMac. And, please do not apologize for your native language and English skills - you're conversing quite well in a non-native language FWIW.įirst, the brief IMHO not-so-good news - I would upgrade, either to a newer Windows PC or to a newer iMac, and I would not invest any more money in your current PC. I'll offer additional advice, however, I'm preparing for an office move so I'll be to the point now that additional hardware spec are available. I taught myself this trick over 10 years to cut down the time needed to import and crop SHAPE files in AutoCAD and ArchiCAD - 7-8 hour renders were cut to 20-30 minutes, and SSDs hadn't even been invented yet. Regarding your current PC, consider adding a slave hard drive (a small SSD would do nicely here) and using it as your System's scratch disk and designating the slave drive as the System's cache. If I were you, I would consider buying an updated iMac and upgrading your PC so that it can be used as a render device, offloading rendering to that while you get back to work with your shiny new iMac. If you want an iMac - new versions should be out soon I'm waiting for iMacs with the updated USB-C port interface. The Samsung 850 Pro is the best SATA-based SSD for OS drives - period, and we've tested a bunch of them. On our production Mac Minis - basically render farms - we use two 1TB 850 Pro SSDs (512GB drives would work fine here too.) in a RAID 0 configuration, and this set up pretty much blows our PCs out the back door (a metaphor here). We've also upgraded our Win boxes with Samsung 850 Pro SSDs - as OS drives they blow away any other SATA drive we've used. Version 19 specifies 8GB of RAM as minimum requirements, with 16GB recommended - we use 64GB on our Win boxes and at least 32GB on our Macs, the difference is vast/huge/big. ![]() Regarding your current configuration, you did not specify which version of ArchiCAD that you're using, or whether you're using any additional plug-ins. ![]() Regarding ArchiCAD 20, we're on a subscription so there's no "upgrade" charge - if you're on a single-purchase plan you'll likely be buying a whole new version of ArchiCAD when v. ArchiCAD 20 should be out in its final form soon, and Apple is hosting its WWDC in mid-June - any money you spend now on current hardware will not be wasted, but current Apple hardware will likely be discounted when the new hardware is announced. ![]() The iMac is on-par for performance with any of the Windows boxes we also use. ![]() The iMac is a fantastic tool to use with ArchiCAD 19 and STAR(T) and BIM Server. I'm a longtime Mac/PC and ArchiCAD (and VectorWorks and AutoCAD) user. I'm guessing you're somewhat new to the Mac world.
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