Shopping for a Computer

Greetings!

I’m in the process of shopping around for a new computer. I’m very comfortable with both MAC and PC, but am considering what would be a better choice since I’d like to fully equip it with primarily Adobe Suite, Solidworks, and AutoCAD, but may possibly need Rhino, 3DS Max, Graphite, and/or SketchUp. Does anyone out there have most of these programs and feel that it makes more sense to have PC vs MAC? If PC, what brand did you end up selecting? Of course it’s an investment so I just want to make the most informed, best decision I can. Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

Indication of your budget? There are a few threads already going on about this subject. You may want to take a look!

Greets

Thanks ggbm. My budget is around $1500. I’m aware that a MAC might be out of the question with this amount, but I’m sure I can get a decent PC at this price. Doesn’t need to be top-of-the-line or stellar. I’d be happy with something that can run this software at a good speed with good graphics.

If you want to run Solidworks well, don’t get a Mac, even with boot camp.

1500 will buy you a pretty nicely built PC. First things I would look at would be a refurbished workstation from HP or Dell. If you want a laptop, maybe add Lenovo in the mix.

Or build one and call it good.

NURB, what’s bad about SW and BootCamp? Just curious. I’ve been doing that for the past year. For all I can tell, only some very sporadic video driver display issues?

That’s the biggest part. Video performance. I’ve also seen some issues with large assemblies.

I think if it came to it and you were having issues with the program, they may point to your hardware as being a culprit.

Are you adverse to building your own machine? You can get a pretty powerful rig with $1,500 if you’re willing to piece it together. I’m thinking dual workstation cards, 8 core AMD machine, 16 GB RAM, 256 or 512 GB SSD, and a 1 TB HDD. Plus you might be able to get a decent monitor in there too.

Thanks for the heads up. I was initially considering purchasing a MAC and doing boot camp, but honestly always wondered if issues would arise down the road with that.
I think building a computer would be a great option. I hadn’t thought about it but for my budget it sounds like I can get what I need in terms of value and performance by going this route. Thanks everyone!