Civil 3D | High-Performance Workstations

[BlackBox]

Looking for some input with regard to a new Civil 3D workstation specifically.

What workstations are you using/building/buying?

For my next workstation, I'm hoping to have an i7-7700K +/- 4.5 Ghz or higher, stick with 32 GB RAM but want it to be +/- 3000 Mhz or faster. I'll swap out OEM drive for a Samsung 960 EVO/PRO NVMe SSD (more on that below), and perhaps have an 8 GB NVIDIA P4000 GPU (although with the other specs, anything 4 GB or higher would be great). I confess that the GPU was tentatively selected based on price-point alone, and I've not tested anything better than my old K4000 to-date.

I know there's a lot of articles, and posts for workstations running AutoCAD (which Civil 3D is built on), but Civil 3D is another animal altogether, performance wise. We're not at a stage where we're considering thin clients + VDI/RDS + vGPU, so I'm looking for client (desktop) specs, and/or lessons learned. We're just upgrading user workstations at this time.



I recently started looking at what new technologies have to offer, and the first thing I tested was introducing a Samsung 960 EVO PCIe+NVMe SSD. I was surprised that it was actually cheaper than the equivalent capacity Samsung 850 PRO SATA SSD, and that it listed exponentially better performance. I have to say, that making the Samsung 960 EVO PCIe+NVMe SSD drive my Civil 3D Temp folder alone, is the single best performance upgrade I've had to-date. For some reason latest Dell BIOS+UEFI doesn't support PCIe+NVMe as my boot drive? Grrr.

Using the same project data set on my same server/network, I shaved +/- 20 seconds off the Civil 3D drawing open times (depending on drawing complexity, how many XREFs, etc.). If I open 50 drawings per work day, that saves me +/- 17 Mins, which doesn't seem like a lot, right?

Extrapolating that 17 mins per work day over 5 work days per week, at 50 work weeks per year (17 mins x 250 work days), that's 70.8 hours (or 8.8 work days, or 1.77 work weeks) per year. That's a lot of real time and money I'm being paid to just open drawings (not even work on them)!

... Now, here's where you ask your manager to consider how much they pay an employee for 1.77 work weeks per year, and how many CAD users they have? Haha

Here's my current workstation's specs:

Dell Precision T3600
Windows 10x64 Enterprise
Intel Hex-Core Xeon E5 1650 3.2 Ghz (3.80 Ghz max turbo)
32 GB RAM @ 1600 Mhz
3 GB NVIDIA Quadro K4000 GPU + 3 x 24" Dell Ultrasharp monitors
256 GB Samsung 850 PRO SATA SSD (Boot)
250 GB Samsung 960 EVO PCIe+NVMe SSD (My C3D Temp, Support, Plot, etc folder location)
1 TB 10K RPM WD Velociraptor HDD (Apps, Backups, Data, VM's, etc.)


I've historically had Dell Precision workstations, but am disappointed that they're all Xeon now, in lieu of offering i7, and cap out @ 3.5 Ghz which isn't much of an upgrade to what I have now. The Optiplex, and XPS systems are equally disappointing.

I've looked at Xi Computers, but find their website to be cumbersome, and the systems seem to be way overpriced as well (despite getting more of the specs I want).


Cheers