Building an Engineering Workstation
I spend way too much of my time on computers. During the day, I do CAD work, finite element analysis, engineering reports, and more PowerPoint presentations than I like to think about. At night, I maintain this site and do some software development.
At home, my desktop machine has been limping along for a couple of years now. My laptop is good for word processing and Internet work, but I'm starting to hit its limitations on other applications. So I decided it was finally time for a new workhorse machine.
Machine Specifications
Although this new machine is for home, I wanted a low-end engineering workstation. I'm starting to do some simple analysis and CAD work at home, and I expect that work to increase in the future. This was is a business purchase, so it can't look like a gaming machine to the IRS.
Based on that, my basic requirements are:
- Pentium III or comparable
- 256 MB RAM, expandable to a minimum of 512 MB
- 19 inch monitor
- Minimum 18-20 GB hard drive space
- Good OpenGL graphics card
- Windows NT 4.0
- Zip drive
- Expandable
As an engineering machine, multimedia capabilities aren't important. I need a sound card, but a basic one will do. DVD is optional: it might be nice, but I can't think of any software that requires it. (In fact, the only non-gaming software I can think of that's available as DVD is Microsoft's MSDN.)
Cable modems and DSL aren't available in my area, and aren't likely to be available anytime soon, so a 56k modem is the best I can use. But I do need fax and voice capabilities.
Finally, I set a budget of $2000 for the machine. I could afford to go a bit higher; I was hoping to end up a bit under.
Build Versus Buy
My first home system was a Quantex. Since I have been perfectly happy with it, I of course considered buying a pre-built system (Quantex or otherwise). The sub-$1000 machines don't meet my requirements, but many of the $2000 systems come pretty close.
The problem I ran into was that most of the systems in the $2000 range are really high-end gaming systems. They have a lot of things I don't need (like DVD), and the graphics cards are selected more for DirectX performance than OpenGL performance.
To get a real engineering workstation, even a low-end one, I would have to jump up to about $3000. That was outside my budget, but still within the range I could afford. At that price range, though, there were still some extras, and they subtracted from the quality of some of the other components. Also, I found that expandability was somewhat limited.
At this point, I decided to build the system myself. Preliminary price checks showed I would pay no more than a I would for a pre-built system, and I would most likely save money. The system wouldn't have a warranty, but each of the components would.
Of course, although my financial costs would be lower, I would have to spend more time on assembling the system. However, I've built two systems at work, and I had each of those running in a day.
In addition to the lower price, the big advantage of a home-built system is that I can pick every component.