Xeon vs i5 vs 8320 for CAD

[Coda87]

I am building my first PC, and i will be doing lots of 3D modeling and rendering. I am looking to spend about $250 on the cpu, but i cannot decide between a Xeon 1231, an i5, or an AMD 8320. I will becusing mostly TurboCAD21, however, there will probably be some autodesk Inventor, and possibly Solidworks. However, this will also have to fairly good with gaming, as i don't want just a work rig.

 

[i7Baby]

The Xeon will be best for CAD. See Cinebench R15 benchmarks.

 

[synphul]

It depends on what you're using for cad, like with anything else.

"Some components of AutoCAD® Release 14 do handle multithreading (for example, the AutoLISP® interpreter is a thread), but AutoCAD Release 14 is not a thread-safe application and not really a multithreaded application. An ARX application can make full use of multithreading as long as it is the only thread that communicates with AutoCAD. Again, this is because AutoCAD is not thread safe. Falling to do so will cause synchronization problems."

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Multithreading-or-multiprocessor-capabilities.html

There are other cad programs available I'm sure, autocad is one of the largest. It depends on the software being used, otherwise you may end up essentially spending more for a xeon with slower clocks where the ht you paid extra for will offer little to no benefit or even cause problems.