Workstations

Created by Tomas on 10 July, 2018

Hi,

I'm a new mechanical engineer (apprentice). I want to buy a used cad mobile workstation because a new one is to much pricey for me. I want an advice on what professional GPU is the minimum for middleweight mechanical assemblies in PTC Creo and Solidworks.


The current Nvidia Quadro range with Lenovo starts with :

- Quadro T1000

- Quadro T2000

- Quadro RTX3000

- Quadro RTX4000

- Quadro RTX5000


The previous range is :

- Quadro P1000

- Quadro P2000

- Quadro P3000

- Quadro P3200

- Quadro P4000

- Quadro P5000


What is the threshold for good mid-range 3D CAD capabilities. I have a sentiment that 3 TFLOPS single precision is a minimum. Thus saying that P1000, T1000 are out of range. It is leaving the threshold with T2000, P2000 as a minimum.

Is that a good assumption? I would like detailed comments. P2000 and P3000 seems to be pretty similar despite the numbering difference according to www.techpowerup.com. And P3200 seems to be equal or slightly better than P4000 according to :

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Quadro-P4000-vs-Quadro-P3000-vs-Quadro-P3200-vs-Quadro-P3200_7666_7665_7666_8764.247598.0.html

Is there an explanation for the two affirmations?


According to what I just said, I saw these used mobile workstations on Ebay (under 2500$CA = 1900$US) :


Are they good for a mid-range 3D CAD (for a beginner)?


The last thing, I would like to classify the different workstation makers by reliability (Lenovo, MSI, Dell, HP, others?).

I like the sleekness of MSI, but I like the ruggedness of Lenovo...


Thank you!


Joel Lapointe