office interior design revit
hey, eric here were 30 by 40 design workshop,talking about how to choose the best computer for architecture today. whether you're a student, aspiring architect,a draftsperson, or if you're in a related professional discipline, we’ll dig intothe things you should look for and their order of relative importance. now, because computer specs change so ofteni'm gonna keep this general in nature, so no specific model numbers. but, i'll update the cards up here over timewith current recommendations. i'm going to talk about how architects usecomputers in practice so you can see which
system requirements are most important toeach one of those daily tasks; this should give you a framework for making the decisionno matter when in the future, you're looking for a new one. alright, i'm not gonna spend a lot of timehere because i think this is actually an easy one. if you don't have a system yet or if you'rea student, get a laptop. done. when you're ready to supplement it and youhave a permanent place where you can put a desktop system, you'll buy that to complementit.
of course, laptops are more expensive pound-for-poundthan desktop systems, but portability i think wins out here. you'll use it for field work, job site meetings,and even measuring existing conditions. and, what i like to do is bring it with meand i'll draft the building that i'm measuring right into autocad as i measure it so, that'sa huge time savings. of course, there's also client or planningboard meetings, presentations, talks, teaching opportunities, and you'll need one if you'retraveling to the remote projects anyhow. now, obviously there's a lot to choose fromin the laptop category. you'll want to focus in on the more powerfulmobile workstations, not ultra-books, or notebooks,
or airs; here, portable doesn't mean light. between a large screen, a fast cpu, and theupgraded hardware you'll need to run powerful graphics software, all of that doesn't fitinto a small light case. check out brands like: msi, asus, dell andits alienware line, apple, and lenovo for starters; these are all really good brands. this one's a little tricky. although many of the cad, bim, and modelingsoftwares are native to the windows operating system, you can have almost anything you wanton either operating system. having used both in the past in productionenvironments, i don't actually think they're
that different. yes, the ui is different, and the design andthe internal hardware too, but they have roughly equal capabilities. what you will notice is: lagging or slow loadtimes, or render times, lagging context clicks. generally, any time you're using the softwareand it's slow to respond those are the things you'll notice most and importantly, thoseare things that impact your efficiency and how much you can get done in a day. now, assuming you can solve those things witheither a pc or a mac - and i think you can - then software choice, budget, and optionalityare probably the more important drivers of
the decision to choose one platform over another. it's fair to say that mac's are more expensivethan pcs, they're not as easy to upgrade or swap out parts like hard drives, or upgraderam, and they're also more limited in the natively ported software you'll have to choosefrom. notably absent from mac os are two industryfavorites: revit and 3ds max. but, for bim software in a mac environmentthere's vectorworks or archicad and for modeling you have access to rhino and sketchup. another industry standard, autocad is availablefor both. now, it's worth noting here that many of thebest architecture schools here in the us,
like the gsd at harvard and cornell, stronglyrecommend students purchase windows-based laptops. at the very least you must be capable of runningwindows on your laptop if you're a student there. now, windows-based machines offer more customizableoptions for system configurations and are sort of inherently future-proofed becauseso many of the components are swappable. so, you'll have a more adaptable machine overthe time you're in school, or over a period of years rather than having to buy an entirelynew set up every couple of years. if you want to use windows based programslike revit or 3ds max on a mac you'll have
to either virtualize windows using parallelsor buy boot camp and actually boot windows on your mac. and, although boot camp is the recommendedway to do this, it means that if you're running photoshop in a mac environment and revit ina windows environment on your mac, you'll have to reboot your machine every time youwant to switch between the two applications. that's not only a pain, it's a terribly inefficientworkflow. so, here's what you'll be doing a lot of asan architect: you'll be doing a lot of drawing, and cad, 3d modeling, maybe some rendering,there's lots of communication, which is both in written form, and graphic form.
you have schedules to write, specificationsto write, you have budgets to track, there'll be some photo editing, and of course you'llhave video conferencing, things like skype. then those specialty tasks like laser cutting,special modeling, or texturing, or really high-end rendering, or - if you're like me- audio and video editing. so, you have to choose which software is thelimiting determinant for your hardware. designing architecture requires we use graphicallyintense applications for 3d modeling, rendering, and cad work. and, the cpu is the brain that does all thenecessary calculations. now, there's a lot of technical jargon towade through when you're looking at processors
and i know it can be intimidating. kaby lake, ryzen, i5, i7, intel, amd, cores,chipsets. for most architecture tasks, you basicallywant to buy the fastest processor you can afford. now, you'll also hear about multi-core processors,quad cores, dual cores, so what does all that mean? well, this has to do with how your softwareuses the cpu to do the necessary calculations. and, stick with me here, this is actuallypretty simple. there's a difference in the way that 3d rendering,3d modeling, and cad drafting software assigns
tasks to your processor. 3d modeling and cad drafting software aregenerally single-threaded tasks, while rendering, ray tracing, and video transcoding are generallymulti-threaded. single-threaded means it can only happen onone core of the processor at a time, while multi-threaded means the task can be splitup and assigned to more than one core of your cpu simultaneously. so, if you plan to do a lot of 3d rendering- or in my case - video transcoding, the more cores you can access, the faster your renderingtimes will be. for 3d modeling or cad tasks, multiple coreswon't help as the software can only assign
the tasks to one core at a time. so, with those you're really concerned withgetting the fastest speed for any individual core. so, just having multiple cores doesn't meanyou'll see an advantage because it's software dependent. now, just because you're a cad drafting softwareright now isn't multi-threaded doesn't mean it won't be in the future. but, if you're looking for just a cad workstationand you won't be doing much rendering or video editing then it's better to buy the fastestprocessor you can afford rather than buying
one with more cores. of course, there are exceptions. if you're using bim software like archicad,that actually does use multi-threading, so more cores will offer better performance. now, besides all this, multiple cores aregood because they free up resources for other tasks to take place at the same time on thecomputer. you'll no doubt be switching between autocadand photoshop and a browser window let's say, so you'll want the ability to do that withouta lot of lag. having multiple cores will allow you to bea better multitasker.
in general, with cpus, higher clock speeds- this is the gigahertz number - will provide a peppier and sort of smoother experience. now, a lot of people misunderstand what agraphics card actually does. it doesn't actually make your modeling tasksfaster. your graphics card controls how fast yourdisplay repaints itself, how fast it refreshes the results of your modeling and renderingtasks. if you've ever seen a model sort of laggingon the screen as you rotate it, that's usually because the graphics card is underpowered. a dedicated, or as it's often called - discrete- graphics card is one designed specifically
for graphics intensive work and it standsseparate from the cpu. it controls how many frames per second yourscreen will refresh. for 3d drafting, modeling, photoshop, lightroomwork and video editing, you'll care a lot about how fast your screen regenerates whenworking. these tasks require a lot of computation andthe better your card, the faster and smoother your screen experience will be. you want to always check your software manufacturer’swebsite for individual card recommendations to make sure they're compatible. you can spend multiple thousands on graphicscards, but you have to balance things here.
if you need a quadro card you're probablyin the specialty market and sort of beyond the scope of this video. if you have no idea what a quadro card is,then you're definitely in the right place. 1080p, 4k, 5k, 8k, this is simply referringto your screen size in pixels. now, the screen behind me here is a 5k screen,it's 27 inches wide. that screen is 5120 pixels wide by 2880 pixelshigh. with screen size or resolution, bigger - inmy opinion - is always better. your cad graphics and modeling work will involvelots of zooming around and large sheet sizes; the larger your screen the less of this navigationyou'll have to do and the more time efficient
you'll be. more screen real estate also allows you tobounce between open applications checking things, cross referencing other materials,picking up redlines - you know, things like that. so, on my desktop system i still feel likei could use more space. on a laptop, you'll be confined to 15 or 17inch monitors so there's actually a lot less space. of course, if you pair a laptop with an externalmonitor or two, you'll double or triple the room available.
so, take that into account as well. another thing that affects how life-like andrealistic your picture is, is pixel density, or pixels per inch. so, this 5k retina display has a pixel density,or ppi, of 219 which is roughly equivalent to the 15-inch macbook pro’s retina displayat twenty-eight eighty by eighteen hundred pixels. a retina display simply refers to that pixeldensity that's high enough where the human retina can't pick out the differences betweenindividual pixels. the closer it is, the higher the density needsto be.
so, if you're holding something in your handsat about twelve inches away, that number turns out to be close to 300 pixels per inch, whereason a desktop you're slightly further away so it's lower. the amount of information you're able to storein ram directly affects how fast you'll perceive your system to be. the instant response when executing commandslike context menu clicks is attributable to the amount of ram you have. the more you have, the more programs willuse, up to a certain point. but, it will also help keep recent files closeat hand and quickly accessible.
eight gig is a suggested minimum for mostsoftware today, 16-gig is better. when spec’ing your system, make sure youhave a path to upgrade it later. more slots are always better; this will accommodatefuture operating system upgrades and it's an inexpensive way to increase performanceif a new software package has left you feeling underpowered. now, ram is also classed by its speed too,so higher numbers are always better. ssd or solid-state drives are really fast. they don't have moving parts and so you canaccess your data extremely fast. putting your operating system and your programand system files on a solid-state drive will
give you a definite speed advantage, and theyuse less power which is great on a laptop. they're also generally more reliable. the trade-off here is that they're actuallypretty expensive. your other option is the hdd or hard diskdrive. now, these use disks or spinning plattersto store your data. these, of course, do have moving parts, whichmeans they're slower and more apt to break over the life of your computer. but, they're also much less expensive permegabyte of storage space. the trend today is to use hdd drives as datadrives to store the masses of files you don't
need to access all the time, and ssds to installthe operating system and applications. this allows the speed advantage of loadingapplications and your operating system quickly, and then you can save on the cost of the largeamount of data space you'll need to store all your files if you pair a 256 or 512 gigabytesolid-state drive with a one terabyte or two terabyte hard disk drive. that offers a good balance of speed, price,and storage capability. apple refers to this combination as theirfusion drive. up until earlier this year, i used a combinationof pcs and macs with the pc almost exclusively being used for cad and modeling work.
but, when the motherboard in my very old delllaptop died, i decided to move completely over to macs. now, for me, the choice came down to a fewthings - and this is a genius plan by apple by the way - the mac seamlessly integrateswith the life i've created on my iphone. now, like it or not, there's so many partsof my life that are wrapped up in the iphone: the apps i use are there, there's messaging,podcasts, my calendar, photos, notes, music, and all of this, it transfers back and forthbetween my mobile life and my desktop. now, that's a big deal to me. and, this ui advantage, it really does matterbecause it saves me time.
and, lastly - and this is super importantto you – ultimately, the software i wanted to run helped me make the choice. i knew autocad could run natively on the macnow and there's a few other programs i rely on every day like final cut pro 10, that onlyexist on the mac. now, i was never a big of the windows environment,but i used to love the fact that i could sort of get under the hood and adjust things, tweak,and fine-tune, but i also found that that meant i could really break things doing thattoo. now, this may sound clichã©, but macs don'trequire me to tweak things endlessly to get things working the way i want.
does that mean less customization? yes. but, i'm okay with that honestly. i want the computer sort of get out of myway and i do find that the mac does that pretty well for me. in my experience though, pcs and macs areequally reliable. i've had major trouble with both of them inthe past. your computer is really just another toolto help you do your work, it won't make you a good designer, or architect.
if that insanely beautiful rendering isn'tbacked up by good design, it has very little meaning. so, i'll close by reminding you that computersdon't obviate the need for sketching, and physical model building. all architects sketch. all architects build models. learn to use these tools, in addition to purchasinga really nice computer, and learning 3ds max, or v-ray. good tools are force multipliers and theyhave a value that far exceeds their cost.
now, if i've helped you in any way, pleasesmash that like button below and say hello in the comments. have you noticed i hang around in the commentsfor a while right after i upload the video? until next time, cheers!