Realistic Configuration

[satishm]

Autodesk recommends the following System Requirements

Intel® Pentium® III or AMD Athlon™ processor or better, 500 MHz (800 MHz recommended)
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional, Home Edition (AutoCAD only), or Tablet PC Edition (AutoCAD only); Windows 2000; or Windows NT® 4.0 (SP6 or later)
256 MB RAM for single-user projects; 512 MB RAM for multiuser projects
300 MB free disk space for installation
1024x768 VGA display with true color (minimum)
OpenGL® compatible 3D video card (optional, AutoCAD only)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later
CD-ROM drive

But this seems quite inadequate for editing.
Most of the systems recommended here are cutting edge and for userss doing large resolution renderings etc

My question is : What is the configuration for projects of 100-200 thousand sq. ft. for preparing construction documents

[Scott D Davis]

Two things are important for a Revit machine:

1. Processor - Get the biggest, baddest, fastest processor you can afford. It takes computing power to cruch the numbers of a Revit database. It'll run on the minimum specs (I run it on a pIII 450 at home :shock:) but it'll be much faster on a fast processor. Single processor is fine, although the rendering engine will use two if you got 'em. Dual processors is also good if you multitask, as Revit will run on one, while other apps on the other.

2. RAM - Get at least a Gig, 2 Gigs if you can afford it. The more RAM, the better. Everything will run faster in Revit with more RAM.

Things that don't seem to make a difference:

1. Video card
2. Open GL

Hope that helps!

[mlgatzke]

My lab uses Dell Precision Workstations with P4 1.5 Gig processors and 500MB of 800MHz Rambus RAM with a FireGL video card. They work fairly decently on a typical 20,000sf commercial building, but begin to bog down near the end with all the details and interior elevations. I've bumped some of them to 1GB of RAM and that's doing the trick for now. We're looking to buy new workstations by Summer (Dual Processor 3Gigs with 2GB of RAM).

[BomberAIA]

I'm using a laptop P4 1.4GHz w/ 1 gig of ram. It gets slower the bigger the project when I save the drawing or import large acad drawings. I am buying a Dell Inspiron 3.4 GHz Extreme Edition w/ 1 gig of Ram & 128 megs of video ram. As soon as I can find PC3200 DDR 1 gig chips, I'll upgrade my ram to 2 gigs.

[hand471037]

I recently swtiched from a Dual Xeon P4 2.4 Ghz w/ 2 Gigs of Ram to a Single Hyperthreaded P4 @ 3.0 Ghz w/ 1 gig of ram, and other than rendering time/ability (that extra gig helped a lot sometimes!) both systems peform almost the same day-to-day. The whole 'hyperthreaded' thing worked out a lot better than I expected too.

But the first machine that I did Revit work with, and that I worked on until just four-or-five months ago, was a P-III 933 Dual w/ 512 Megs ram. While it was workable for what I was doing, I could barely open some larger models, like the example Library project included on the Revit CD.