Hey everyone, I’m just starting the academy and have been having trouble with my 9 year old MacBook crashing while using fusion. I’m looking into building a workstation desktop computer that can run CAD all day without any issues. My budget is $500 for the tower, including purchasing the OS. If anyone has any recommendations on what hardware, or is willing to share their own build, it would be greatly appreciated. I am new with building computers and don’t even have a clue where to start. Thanks in advance.
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I have a Lenovo desktop I bought refurbished on eBay for less than $300 and it runs everything I need to do flawlessly.
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most dell xps or similar “gaming” work stations will work for most fusion work. my suggestion would be to aim tor at least 12gb RAM and some sort of stand alone graphics like NVIDIA and at least an intel core i5 processor. something like this would be more than enough.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-elitedesk-desktop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-2tb-hard-drive-pre-owned-black/6219299.p?skuId=6219299
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Now that I think about it more I believe I bought it through walmart.com they have a lot of refurbished computers had a great price.
Awesome, I’ll for sure look into that! Thank you!
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Sounds like fun! if you build it yourself I would start on PCpart’s picker. You can check to see if all the components are compatible. They also have a lot of great starter builds on there. I would invest in larger RAM memory for CAD. Video cards are nice but most CAD programs are optimized for CPU rendering. Solidworks just got an update where they were bragging about how they utilize the video cards and that they were the only ones, I don’t know how true that is. Don’t worry about a fast SSD, but spend a little extra on your hard-drive you don’t want to loose all your data after a crash.
PCpartPicker website:
https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/
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