RAM and it's effect on Autocad.

[sjz]

A couple years ago we decided to use Xi computers as our Autocad workstations. We thought they were spec'ed out pretty well but a short in all the USB ports fried the MOBO's so I replaced them 1 by 1 as they went down. Since then I have never been fully 100% happy with how they preform so finally my small company is in a position to buy new workstations so I started doing some research.
What I found is our 2.5yr old computers are still fairly well equipped to handle Autocad with one exception the RAM.

We're running:
Pent. 4 at 3.2Ghz
with 1.00 GB or RAM
NVIDIA Quadro FX 500/600 (not sure of the megs)

As we went from 06 to 07 and now to 08 I'm noticing HUGE lags in the processing of the drawings and working in autocad in general.

Seems like a no brainer but could it be that it's just the RAM or should I just be looking to go for a whole new workstation?

[dgorsman]

I'm in the same position (almost to a tee, only we built our own), and from my research its a whole new computer. Not just for AutoCAD, but to handle future software and hardware upgrades as well.

[cadtag]

Here's your trade-off. Going up in RAM to 2 or 3 Gb is your cheapest fix, and will make a difference. Getting better, high-end workstation graphics will work better with 2008 and beyond.

But if you replace the whole, the hard drives can be upgraded to SATA, and raided, striped, or whatever. dual core will help Windows, and marginally help Acad. Your probably hyper threaded already with that CPU, so duals won't have _that_ much of an impact.

The question is, if you defer the new purchase and just upgrade this year, will you be able to buy new next year, or will the money be gone? Minor point is can the existing machine be re-purposed to avoid buying a standard desktop? That can change the overall cost of the workstations.

Buying new, you'll have to watch out and make sure they don't give you Vista for the OS. By the majority of reports, vista is a 'less than stellar' production workstation OS (and that's without going into the draconian EULA!). Stick with XP Pro

[Ogre]

I would definitely suggest adding more RAM...I went from 1 GIG to 3 GIG and disables the pagefile in Windows and the difference is amazing...