anyone use an Intel Xeon E5 series yet?

[rbcameron1]

Can anyone give me an idea on whether or not the Xeon E5 series is decent with Revit? The quick answer, is probably "yes of course" but I remember the problems I had with the 2nd generation i7 and its integrated graphics with Revit. Just wondering if anyone has any advice when specifying this for our new computer upgrades. I know the Xeon 5600 series is more than capable of handling Revit, but I certainly wouldn't mind jumping into a 3.0Ghz 8-core with a 20Mb L2 cache. ;)

-rbcameron

[antman]

I don't know anything about the processor, but I have yet to see integrated graphics work well for anything beyond browsing the web. Of course, that's just my limited experience speaking. Maybe someone else can offer some better info.

[patricks]

I think you mean 20MB L3 cache.

hmmm let's see, cheapest one on Newegg is the E5-2650 Sandy Bridge 2.0 GHz, which is $1,100. My take? ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOT worth that money in the SLIGHTEST!

Do yourself a favor and spec a newer i7 Sandy Bridge CPU which runs about $300. Our office used to spend $3K-$4K per machine on Xeon-equipped Precision machines. But then the last two machines we have purchased (mine being the first) have been i7 Studio XPS machines which absolutely blow the others out of the water, and cost less than $2K.

Maybe with super graphics-intensive stuff like audio/video production, CGI rendering and the like, it might be worth it. But not for Revit. Massive waste of money IMHO.

Best bang for the buck is going to be an i7 Sandy Bridge 3.4 GHz and a GeForce GTX 560 1 GB graphics card, which will be less than $450 for both of those together.

[MikeJarosz]

When I discovered that Autodesk allows downloading Revit to a home machine, as long as only one is in use at a time, I downloaded to my home machine, a Dell Inspiron 530 with Vista! It has no power at all. I only use it for email. Guess what? I get a warning that the video card hasn't been tested, but otherwise Revit works just fine.

Maybe these power machine requirements are baloney.

[patricks]

They aren't. My home machine is an old home-build with XP x86, Core2 Duo processor, and 3 GB RAM. Revit 2011 barely runs on the thing, to the point that I didn't even bother putting 2012 on it. When I work from home I've been just using Remote Desktop to my office workstation. But even that is getting to be a pain for me (slow refresh, lagging, freezing), which is why I'm about to be upgrading my home machine to i7 and 16 GB RAM on Win7 Pro x64.

[MikeJarosz]

Interesting. My Inspiron 530 has a celeron processor and 2 gb. I swear the performance is acceptable. I am using it for my home kitchen remodel.

In the office I have a Dell Precision T3500 64 bit 4 core on Win 7 with 12 gb, NVidia quadro 1800, double screen. Of course, I see a difference, but not enough to give up at home and drag my kitchen project into the office. In NYC that commute means trains, boats, subways buses and planes to get from the burbs to midtown Manhattan. (slight exaggeration). And I walk the last 5 blocks.

[rbcameron1]

I plan on using it for 3dsMax 2012+ too. Sorry, I should've clarified that since it makes a big difference. Need as many cores as possible for that stuff. I can't seem to find anyone that makes a dual-processor board for any i7 processor. Seems like Xeon is the only way to go in those terms. Dell Precision T3600 are going for under $2K with decent video cards an a Xeon last I checked.

Is Revit still 1-core, fastest core only still?

[mthurnauer]

It depends on the task. It can use as many cores as you have for rendering. But, most operations are one-core. I would be curious what your intended budget is. Revit or Max, I would consider building a render server for the heavy rendering and do less with a desktop machine.

[MikeJarosz]

It can use as many cores as you have for rendering. But, most operations are one-core.

In the Autodesk hardware requirements for R2013 they state:

CPU Type


Multi-Core Intel Xeon, or i-Series processor or AMD equivalent with SSE2 technology. Highest affordable CPU speed rating recommended.

Revit products will use multiple cores for many tasks, using up to 16 cores for near-photorealistic rendering operations

I take this to mean that multiple cores are used for rendering just as you claim, but "multiple cores for many tasks" contradicts your assertion that "most operations are one-core."

It's highly technical stuff like this that Autodesk never discloses any details about. I have been to the AD developer conference twice and met Jeremy Tammik and Emile Kfouri in the classroom. You can ask these guys exactly which commands are multithreaded, and they can give you an informed answer. There really are people at the heart of Autodesk who write the code and know exactly how things are done by the program.

Jeremy does neat tricks like write the "hello world" program in C#, compile it to machine code, then decompile it into Visual Basic. Magic!

[rbcameron1]

My budget is basically whatever it needs to be to get the job done. Buying these little $2,400 computers that are obsolete 2 days later is getting annoying. As far setting up a rendering farm, we only have one guy, maybe two that would need it, so cost vs. use comes into play. We'd rather have 1 or 2 monster machines (in house not cloud) that can handle 3dsMax + iRay and also have Revit open. I'm not sold on "cloud" possibilities just yet. We're getting great results with Autodesk's Revit Render cloud....but...not all materials, rpc's, etc. transfer to it yet. Not sure why I couldn't just use my quad-core tablet essentially as a thin client into my own server/workstation? Then I'm not locked into a contract with a cloud provider. Anyone successfully using a legitimate cloud provider like BIM9?