Originally posted by Adambomb:
Bringing my "two years outdated"
experience to the table, as others have mentioned, Solidworks graphics demands have not grown in proportion to hardware capabilities. In fact, with the size of models we use, if you don't get absolutely crazy, I still get perfectly acceptable performance on our whole car model with a 5 year old gaming card I paid under $200 for new with a soft mod. Hell, the low-end gaming Radeon 3200 in my laptop handles our 2010 whole car model relatively decently. If I were building a $1000 system, with 6 years of acceptable SAE performance in mind, I would also budget about $150-$200 for a low-end workstation card.
The current trend since about 2003 with Solidworks has been to become more CPU demanding than GPU demanding. The models themselves have not really gotten much more complex to render. Model rebuild times are the times you want to reduce, as every time you change something it has to rebuild. And those are dependent on CPU speed, still mostly on a single processor, and memory speed/system bandwidth. The trend is moving towards more multi-threading, but processor requirements are increasing much faster than graphics requirements.
For motherboards that seems like a pretty simple deal, but I know the lower-end ones, at least for the AM2 and AM3 ones I was shopping for 2-3 years ago, lacked support for the latest Hypertransport and memory standards, or didn't support the power requirements of the latest processors. No reason to hamstring your system by trying to save $50 on a motherboard. Also the motherboard is something I wouldn't want to go cheap on, as a cheapo one could crap out on you in 2 years. And that was another plus for AMD over Intel, in addition to the processors being cheaper the motherboards were $50-$100 less for a comparable one. Speaking of processors, comparing apples to apples, the Core i5 was built to compete with the Phenom II after they started waxing Core2 Quads. To my knowledge the Core i5 will be a step up from a Phenom II, beyond that AMD just really doesn't compete. But if you're shopping for Core i5s the AMD could be a cheaper alternative, will have probably about the same memory and system bandwidth, but be down a bit on grunt processing power.
As for building an SAE computer for a dual role with gaming, I say hell no! We have already had problems with people deciding Call of Duty was more important than FSAE, but at least they weren't tying up SAE resources while they were also not getting their job done. Robot Unicorn Attack and other totally badass flash-games are great to get the "glaze off your eyes" after 26 consecutive hours of cost-report madness, but my general rule is if it has a plot or has any type of graphics hardware requirements, it's not good to have in the SAE lab.
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