Core i7 or Dual Xeon in Nov 2014?

[sofip]

Which is currently better for a 3-D CAD Workstation build, choosing one Core i7 or Dual Xeon processors? I am having a hard time finding consistent information. Thanks in advance!!

 

[mdocod]

Most CAD programs are still poorly threaded, and most software in general is incapable of scaling well across CPUs that are on totally separate sockets (remember, separate sockets, means separate memory space and separate caches, so communication between cores is not fantastic).

Best value hardware config right now for CAD work (like solidworks, autocad, etc) is going to be something like an E3-1226V3, E3-1231V3 or E3-1271V3 on a C226 chipset motherboard with ECC DDR3 UDIMMs, and a Quadro K2200 or better.

 

[sofip]

Thank you so much. I read that ECC isn't absolutely necessary... It depends on how safe you actually want to be... But your recommendation is very much appreciated!!

 

[mdocod]

Glad to help 😉

You could do an H97 board, non-ECC memory, and a GTX750Ti and get similar performance in some CAD applications, but there is more room for problems there. I have heard plenty of 3rd party reports of view-port anomalies in CAD software when using non-workstation GPUs. The cost to implement ECC memory is mostly the additional costs of the motherboard itself (add ~$100), the price of the memory isn't much higher (~$90 per 8GB stick of DDR3).