How to balance specs for both a CAD and ray tracing ready machine.
Dell has sponsored this post.
How can you tell reality from CGI? These days, it’s not easy. Physically-based rendering has given us a quality of photorealism previously reserved for the, well, real.
For product designers, this newfound realism is really nifty. CAD programs have always been able to represent geometry in a stark, pragmatic way, but there’s a real world of difference between shaded geometry and the visual cortex. See for yourself:
With access to photorealistic depictions of their CAD creations, product designers can get a better sense of their design, iterate more quickly and ultimately create better products. But these photorealistic renderings can’t take forever; real-time feedback is required to make it worthwhile. Since 2018, real-time photorealism has been the defining feature of NVIDIA’s graphics cards, which in turn has driven hardware and software providers across the industry to follow suit.
In this article, we will help guide you to the right workstation hardware to take advantage of this trend. We’ll explain the top considerations when configuring a workstation for design visualization, and provide a few suitable options from the Dell Precision lineup of desktop and mobile workstations.
Finding the Balance Between CPU and GPU
Any workstation worth its salt will have two processing units: a central one, the CPU, and a graphics one, the GPU. While most CPUs today include an integrated GPU, you’ll need a discrete one for any serious graphical work.
For product design workstations, this can pose a slight problem. The CAD part of the workflow will thrive on a great CPU, while the visualization part of the workflow demands a great GPU. Unless you have an unlimited budget for your workstation, you will need to make a tradeoff: awesome CPU and entry level GPU? Fantastic GPU and budget friendly CPU? Or a middling version of each?
Thankfully, this balancing act is easier than it appears. Let’s start with the CPU. The majority of CAD software is single threaded (or lightly multi-threaded) for most functions, meaning designers can evaluate a CPU based on one metric: its clock speed. The higher the clock speed, the faster CAD programs will perform. As long as your CPU has a high clock speed, you can ignore some of the other specs that add to the price: namely, a high core count. If only one core is doing the work at a time, you don’t need 16 of them.
For most CAD workflows, six cores is a good baseline, and eight or more is not necessarily worth the price. As for clock speed, the higher the better—the fastest CPUs will clock out around 5GHz on Turbo.
Now on to the GPU. For professional workflows, NVIDIA is the brand of choice, and the company’s RTX technology is what brought real-time photorealism to the market. This is accomplished with a component of RTX graphics cards called an RT Core, which stands for ray tracing. Ray tracing is the mathematical technique used to achieve photorealism, as it simulates rays of light in a virtual scene—exactly as our analog eyes would perceive it. RT Cores are paramount for real-time photorealistic design visualization.
Until recently, RT Cores were only available in the mid-level RTX GPUs and above. Entry level GPUs, such as the NVIDIA Quadro T2000, lacked this visualization feature. But with the latest Ampere RTX professional graphics lineup, this is no longer a limitation. The successor to the T2000, the RTX A2000, now offers RT Cores at an entry level price. And while the number of RT Cores (and therefore, real-time ray tracing performance) increases with GPU price, the entry-level option provides designers a lot more wiggle room when configuring a visualization workstation.
Suggested base CPU:
- Desktop: Intel Core i5-11500 (6 Core, 2.7GHz to 4.6GHz, 12MB Cache)
- Mobile: Intel Core i5-11500H (6 Core, 2.9GHz to 4.6GHz, 12MB Cache)
Suggested base GPU:
- Desktop: NVIDIA RTX A2000 (26 RT Cores, 6GB VRAM)
- Mobile: NVIDIA RTX A2000 (20 RT Cores, 4GB VRAM)
Memory and Storage Considerations
How much space do you have on your current computer, and is it enough? Of course not; it never is. Memory and storage are like the opposite of an all-you-can-eat-buffet—no matter how much you take, you’re always hungry for more.
Of course, there are practical considerations. You can’t have infinite memory or storage, so you have to pick something reasonable when configuring your visualization workstation. This initial choice is more important for mobile workstations, as they tend to be much more difficult to upgrade later, whereas desktops give you more freedom to expand.
Regardless, a good rule of thumb for both memory and storage is to figure out what you think you need, and then double it. File sizes trend up, not down, so you might as well give yourself that extra cushion in advance.
For CAD workflows, large assemblies can eat up a lot of memory, and the last thing you want is a slowdown because you ran out of RAM. 32GB is a safe starting point, and ensures enough space for multitasking.
As for storage, you may be able to get away with a smaller hard drive given the ready availability of cloud storage services such as Dropbox. Be careful, however, that you don’t set yourself up for a weekly game of “what should I offload now so I can download this new file.” I would suggest an absolute minimum of 256GB of storage, but follow my earlier advice and double it to 512GB.
If you have the option to set up a RAID array, take it. With two drives, you can set up a RAID 1 array (a redundant mirrored pair) or RAID 0 array (offers no redundancy, but improves read and write performance). Some mobile workstations offer as many as four separate drives, allowing users to set up a RAID 5 array (this requires at least three drives but provides a balance between performance and redundancy) or RAID 10 array (a blend of RAID 1 and 0 requiring at least four drives).
- Suggested base memory: 32GB
- Suggested base storage: 512GB
Dell Precision Workstations for Design Visualization
Let’s now pack this advice together for the Dell Precision line of desktop and mobile workstations. I’ll recommend one of each, starting with the mobile Dell Precision 5560.
The Dell Precision 5560 is the follow-up to last year’s Dell Precision 5550, my favorite of all the laptops I reviewed in 2020. With an emphasis on premium design, the 5560 is a thin, light and good looking device that nonetheless has enough horsepower for design visualization. Here’s the configuration I’d suggest:
Dell Precision 5560 mobile workstation
- CPU: Intel Core i7-11850H (8 Core, 2.5GHz to 4.8GHz, 24MB Cache)
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX A2000 (20 RT Cores, 4GB VRAM)
- Memory: 32GB (2x16GB)
- Storage: 512GB (SSD)
- Price: $2919.00
The Precision 5560 can’t be configured with both an i5 CPU and the A2000 GPU, so the specs above are a bit higher than the minimum I suggested earlier. When it comes to mobile workstations, such compromises are often necessary (though nobody ever regretted a more powerful CPU).
The Precision 5000 series is Dell’s mid-tier thin and light grouping, and unlike the entry-level 3000 series, it offers the NVIDIA RTX A2000 as a graphics card option. For users with more budget and less interest in aesthetics, the Precision 7000 series offers significantly more graphical power. You can read much more about the Dell Precision series in The Latest Dell Precision Workstations Are All New on The Inside.
As for my Precision desktop recommendation, I’d go with the Precision 3650 tower workstation.
The following configuration balances budget with specs suitable to a design visualization workflow, and leaves room for optional upgrades down the line:
Precision 3650 tower workstation
- CPU: Intel Core i5-11600K (6 Core, 3.9GHz to 4.9GHz, 12MB Cache)
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX A4000 (48 RT Cores, 16GB VRAM)
- Memory: 32GB (4x8GB)
- Storage: 512GB (SSD)
- Price: $3099.51
For those needing the most graphical power, the Precision 5820 can be equipped with dual graphics cards linked with NVIDIA’s NVLink bridge. In this way, for example, two NVIDIA RTX A6000 cards could act as a single card with 96GB of VRAM and a total of 168 second generation RT Cores.
Still unsure which workstation configuration is right for you? Check out Dell’s latest eGuide, Selecting the Right Workstation for Design Visualization in Product Development, for more information.
