recommendations for a new pc/workstation

[vanderloo5]

I'm hoping I can finally pull the trigger for a new system and am looking for the best resource for recommendations and reviews.
I'd like to get a dual core processor, 24g ram, 240gb system drive, 1 tb data drive, dual monitors, 64 bit op syst, windows 7, and the best vid card I can get.
Will be used for Revit Architecture, 3DS Max renderings, energy simulation models, photshop editing. Any help would be very much appreciated.
Thank You

[dgorsman]

"Dual core processor"? Do you mean dual processor instead? Most processors are quad- or hex-core now. But that means Xeons or other workstation class processors and motherboards which might be overkill. Be prepared to dig deep in the wallet and don't be surprised if you don't get the performance you think you'll get.

[vanderloo5]

Ya, due to my disconnect with what's available these days I probably should've been a bit more vague on my components descriptions and let the experts point me in the right direction. I should say I was expecting to drop about $4,000ish.
Curious to hear a little more about what you mean by- ".....Don't be surprised if you don't get the performance you think you'll get."

[david_peterson]

the "Boxx" that was in the latest issue of Augi looked nice for about that price. Depends on what you do the most.
IMHO, you're better off buying parts and spending the 4hrs to put the thing together.
You can get an i7 2700x (I think that's the right one) unlock it and overclock it to 4.5GHZ. Only issue with the i7 is the amount of ram it will look at. Also i7 won't use ECC if that's an issue.

[cadtag]

$4k is a lot of money, most of which would not show up in performance. Xeon requires ECC Ram, which is pricy and not worth it at a desktop workstation level. Not sure about your energy simullation software abilities for parallelization or multi threading, but 3ds supports renderfarms does it not? I'd probaly think about a $2K main workstation with lots of RAM and an SSD OS disk, and a second $1500 dollar machine to offload rendering and data files onto.