Looking for some advice on a work station

[ashlor]

Long story short a friend of mine is looking to build a PC that will be solid and super fast on a very low budget. I told her I would do some research on this and see what I could spec out for her. I would like to focus the bulk of this budget on the Video card since she will be rendering mostly in 3D. I am also sort of concerned with disk space and the like. Now I am not real sure about building such a system as I know they are very different form a gaming PC. Would running her program from a SSD be of any benefit to speed, or would the speed really rely mostly on the GPU. Any advice in this sort of build will be super as I continue my research in the build.

[MiRai]

First problem I see...

workstation

super fast

on a very low budget.
In all seriousness this might be rough. Are we talking a full out workstation with a Xeon? Dual Xeon?

When you mention about dumping the most money into a video card... are we talking FireGL/Quadro route
or conventional desktop route?

Do we have an actual budget to work with?

As for SSDs I'm pretty sure it's going to depend on the programs she uses.

I'll be honest though I may be able to provide very little input on this and I'm just asking these questions to
help others perhaps give a better answer.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Go to my forum and see the post on "DeathWalker's Unlimited Money Recommended Multiboxing Computer". Its a 48G ram workstation. Add in a 580 3G ram video card and you are gtg. No SSD needed as your system ram is your SSD.

[fleaplus]

Anything with the new Xeon E3's (sandy bridge) combined with the C204 chipset would make a fine workstation. I would definitely add an SSD though. Some applications use a scratch file on a hard drive regardless of how much ram you have. The creature comfort of a much more responsive machine is also a nice side effect.

VERIFY application compatibility before purchasing a card. Either the 6950 equivalent firegl or low end fermi quadro are $700-800 and would perform great.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I would not recommend SSDs on a workstation unless you spend the bucks for the high-end SSDs, which blows your "on a very low budget" part. Honestly, Fenril is pretty much right about workstation and super-fast and low budget not being congruent. You can build a high-end "pro-sumer" desktop that qualifies as a lower-end workstation for about $1500-2000, though. Basically, a good motherboard, i7-960 or higher CPU, a good 2GB GTX470+ or Radeon 5870+ GPU, Velociraptor RAID-0 and 24GB of RAM. The GPU is where the trouble will be as the workstation-class cards are freakin expensive due to low volume. The CPUs/RAM are pretty much boilerplate. Disks you can get close on as SCSI isn't as much faster than SATA like it was back in the ATA-33/66 days.

[ashlor]

Well I may have mislead there with work station. I know that it will not be used for gaming. The program she will be running will be some form of Auto Cad I believe. The questions you have asked though I think will help me nail down what exactly she will want out of this machine, and what I get out of it is that the program will make the biggest difference.