Building a PC for 3ds Max

Hello everyone

I am trying to build a PC for a friend who uses 3ds Max and Autocad to draw plans and designs for homes (he owns a business). Now his designs are pretty detailed, but I am not familiar with neither autocad nor 3ds Max so I am not sure what sort of hardware to get him. Here is the list I have at the moment, but I am scared I might be going overboard as I am unsure how demanding 3ds Max really is.

Dual Core @ 3.0 GHz

4GB RAM

P35-DS4 Mobo

8600 GT

500 Watt PSU

500 GB HD (SATA)

Generic Case/Heatsink.

He will be running Windows XP Pro.

Any ideas?

Get a workstation card, not a desktop card.Bane_v2

Sorry to trouble you, but any specefic suggestions?

Get a workstation card, not a desktop card.Bane_v2

Agree, a fireGL or a Quadro would be better.

Workstation cards are expensive and I would only recommend one low bugdet Quadro and its the FX 1700, I would go with 4GB of ram and a Q6600 or better CPU though.sadikovic

Yes but they are infinitely more precise and that's what a architect needs.

I'd get a Q6600 for the CPU, and as for the graphics card, all I know is quadro or firegl.Larrymon2000

that's a buget cpu for 3d rendering, go way up unless you wana wait ages

Alright, guess im going for the Q6600. However, these workstation cards seem pretty expensive. How do they differ from the desktop cards like the 8800gt?mon_bus

well if your on a buget then the q6600 is a great cpu but you might like to look into the q9xx series