Civil 3D | High-Performance Workstations

[BlackBox]

Well, I've done it now... I met with the owner and went over the good (Dell), the better (HP), and then best (Boxx) workstation configurations I was able to source this week.

He agrees that Boxx while pricey, would be worthwhile for our dedicated C3D production users, but that the remaining (call them half-time?) users might not need quite so much power.

He wanted to get new monitors as well, and while the 32" 4K monitors are wonderful, you can get dual 27" 4K monitors for the price of a single 32" 4K monitor, so I recommended the dual 27"... Also made the point that I'd rather have the best (Boxx) workstation and keep the 24" non-4K monitors we have now, and upgrade the monitors another time later this year to reduce cost now, because the workstation is where the productivity gains will mostly come from.

He agreed, and liked that I thought to suggest we break all this up into logical segments to benefit multiple users by reallocation - by that I mean, if user A gets a new workstation, then reallocate their out-dated workstation to the Admin assistant, etc.


Also, in speaking with my Boxx rep, what I thought were OEM NVMe SSD's (above) ended up being Samsung 951 drives (Samsung's OEM poorer performing equivalent of the 950 Pro), and not some generic Lite-On drives, or something else.

However, the smallest Samsung 960 drives they'll sell are the 1 TB drives and cost prohibitive if you're seeking a RAID 0 configuration... So you may want to just source those 512 GB Samsung NVMe SSD's separately, and get a large capacity HDD for internal backups to keep the cost of the system down, etc. given that the Samsung 960 drives are so much better than the older 951 drives (just my $0.02).


... We'll see what happens in the next few weeks.

Cheers