Which Computer Should You Buy For Architecture in the United States?

Do you use Revit + AutoCAD + Rhino + SketchUp + 3DS Max + VRay + Adobe + Microsoft Project + Microsoft Office?

Great! Read on.

Are you in the alternate, cross platform universe of Archicad (or Vectorworks) + Rhino + Cinema4D + Corona Render + Adobe (Or Affinity Suite) + OmniPlan + Microsoft Office? Check below.

If you’re not based in the US then the advice will be the same, but the local vendors offering support, pricing, and best choices will be different. Global recommendations are planned in a future version of this website.

There’s a terminology guide.

Students click through here for more different advice.

Buy This Computer

Buy This Display

Two displays is the ideal workspace for efficiency. I like 4K (aka UHD) screens at 125% or 150% scaling for the clear lines and details they show. With recent price drops, you can now have 4K for about the price that used to max at WQHD (2560x1440 pixels).

Top Upgrade Pick

If you want the best that can be bought for an architectural workflow, choose this set up. With cloud rendering as inexpensive as it is currently, a dedicated render node only makes sense if you’re doing more than 10 projects per year that include in-house final rendered images. One accounting bonus of cloud rendering is you can add it to your contract as a reimbursable and transparently pass the cost to the client - harder to do if you already own the rendering computer.

The Office Set Up

If you are more than one or two people, it makes sense to start optimizing employee computers for modeling and offloading high resolution rendering tasks onto dedicated machines in the office. A very high performance render node can be had for about $7,000-$10,000, so you won’t need on until your cloud rendering budget climbs to about $2,500 per year. Even then, you may want to stick with cloud-based rendering or move to GPU-rendering. It’s a time of transition.

If you go with this setup, take the Ultimate build above, and drop one GPU. Then, the render nodes should be either Ryzen 3970x or 3990x if you use V-Ray or another CPU-first renderer, or a 3960x and four GPUs with enough VRAM for your scene complexity if you use a GPU renderer.

Store Your Files on This NAS

If you have another person in your office, you need to share your files. Store them on this. Backup your NAS with Dropbox or Backblaze B2. Why a NAS rather than relying on Dropbox directly? Because you need a copy of all your files where you can see and control them. These files are your work - you should control them as well as you can. The flexibility of having everything on Dropbox is a real boon to workflows, and it keeps a backup copy of everything online as well. Dropbox is the most reliable online service useful for architecture since it can upload just changes in large files (very useful for frequent saves to large files).

Down the Rabbit Hole…

What level of support do I need?

There are three types of warranty coverage available. When you experience a problem, you’re almost always best served by a quick internet search check of your problem, since sometimes this can resolve the issue within minutes. From there, if you bought a prebuilt computer, the company that built it will offer some period of warranty protection for some amount of cost. This hierarchy shows the general value of each level of warranty and what you should look for from a vendor. 

The best support is never needed in the first place. Reducing hardware failures by using high quality components with high quality cooling and assembling it well is the best defense against downtime. Next up, having a good call center is key. Since every service call beings with a call center, the better the call center the more useful the warranty service plan. After that, having a good part replacement policy, preferably where parts are sent rather than the whole system, reduces downtime waiting for the mail. Finally, having onsite services available can be advantageous, especially if a hardware failure coincides with a crunch in the office. 

Different vendors provide different support options. All of the support avenues start with a phone call. This phone call will use more or less time you could be billing depending on the quality of the call center. The larger vendors outsource their support and it can be hit and miss. Smaller, boutique vendors will provide more customized US-based support. Boxx, BIMBOX, and Puget Systems support are US-based and have some familiarity with professional architectural software, which improves their chances of knowing how to triage your support issue. The smaller companies are generally more likely to have a short wait time and a knowledgeable support rep. 

An on-site warranty is available from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Boxx. The quality and responsiveness of the field technicians vary from tech to tech, so you may get mixed results. However, it can be a game changer to have someone come in, usually next business day, to perform a hardware repair or replacement for you when you really need it. 

That said, supporting your own system isn’t quite as daunting and difficult as it may sound. If you assembled it following a video or build guide, you know which parts are which. You can replace the parts yourself, usually for a few hundred dollars or less. These parts do carry warranties once you have diagnosed a failed part, but replacement is almost always a better plan than waiting for service and shipping across the Pacific twice. In addition, since you chose the components, you likely chose the highest quality pieces available. These are the least likely to break after the initial break-in period of a few weeks has passed. 

Regardless of the level of support you choose, there should be an extra workstation available in case a computer goes down. This could be a laptop used for client presentations or a leftover from the last round of workstations that was upgraded. Even the best support will cost hundreds of dollars of downtime, so the best solution is redundancy. Storing your data on Dropbox and a NAS, as advocated in this guide, keeps your data loss minimal and keeps your ability to have an employee jump to a new workstation. Software licensing can be tricky if one is checked out to a down machine, but there will be some procedure that you can call and work through to get up and running shortly. 

Having a single source to call and walk you through support is a nice option. And further, having an on-site warranty available can save significantly on downtime. But sometimes that warranty comes after a much longer phone call due to call center quality. The part was more likely to fail because of computer component quality. So, at the high end, there is Boxx, offering on-site warranties and industry-knowledgeable representatives along with high quality modular components that are less likely to fail. A great middle option is Puget Systems or Digital Storm, who offer good call centers and somewhat less convenient mail-based support options, but again with high quality components that are less likely to fail over time. Supporting your own system saves you money up front, and you will use some of that savings to replace components that fail. Since computers are more reliable than in the past, support is a less important question than it has been historically, but it’s still an inevitable downtime cost and should be managed.

Other Compelling & Mobile Computers for BIM-Based Work

These are some alternatives for less common use cases and for different preferences.

Other Workflows

There are other programs that can slot into the parts of the standard workflow above. This section will cover those alternatives.

The most robust alternative is a cross platform PC and Mac workflow centered around Archicad.

Focus on Visualization

Rendering on CPU and GPU is different from all other architecture tasks. All modeling and drawing software runs on the CPU and is single-threaded, meaning that it relies on one CPU core running as fast as possible to process information. Rendering is the only software that architects use that is multi-threaded, using as many CPU or GPU cores as possible running very fast. These types of software are fundamentally incompatible. Traditionally, rendering software has been CPU based. This means that you were balancing the incompatibility of the single- and multithreaded workloads of drawing and rendering. Now, however, there is a new option with GPU-based rendering. This way, you can use a fast single-threaded processor and offload rendering to the GPU. The industry standard of V-Ray and 3ds Max is still a CPU-first solution, although that is changing slowly as V-Ray adds more GPU-focused features.

A Mostly Complete List of Choices

The Most Popular Choices

For Octane, Redshift, V-Ray GPU, and F-Storm

You may want more GPU power to fully leverage these systems for complex, high resolution final images and animations

But, you’ll be fine with one or two powerful GPUs for most rendering projects with a building and a little bit of site entourage. Two NVIDIA 2080Ti, two NVIDIA Titans, or two NVIDIA RTX 5000 cards will suffice for most renderings. If you want to add significant amounts of foliage, lots of context, animations, cars, people, etc. in VR, then consider going to a four-GPU system or multiples of that type.

Check the build guide for how to build a desktop system focused more on visualization than modeling and drawing tasks.

Alternate & Mobile CPU Rendering Systems

Choosing a Display

For the most part, monitor size and resolution combine to make a selection of working space sizes and clarity and sharpness.

Good Alternative Displays for the Sweet Spot

A Step Down from the Sweet Spot

But still a great choice if the cost of the above are simply too much to justify. These displays offer the same working space with slightly less clarity. Some even prefer the non-scaled WQHD resolution to the shaper-but-scaled 4K selected above.

When Eyesight Passes Peak

These monitors are great choices for those with middling eyesight. Two of these will provide a large and large scaled display, showing large buttons and blowing up text without accessibility features. You could achieve the same style of display with the others suggested monitors but these are by far the least expensive way to get easily visible drawings and text.

Bigger than the Sweet Spot

Big enough that one might suffice if you need a compact but comfortable working space.

When Space is at a Premium

Consider a pair of 24” 4K monitors from Dell (there’s really only the one option). Or, consider moving up to a 31.5” 4K screen, which can be used with lower scaling for extra drawing space on a single display. The HP Z32 and BenQ PD3200U fit the bill nicely.

Value Alternative Displays

I would still always suggest getting two displays, so if the price of the above is simply too much I would choose two of these over one of the above any day.

Expensive Display Upgrades

The best displays available.

Mac + PC Cross Platform Workflows

You will give up a lot of flexibility in your workflow if you use Macs. Any plugin or niche construction program will work on Windows but a very small subset will work on the Mac. Your consultants will be on Windows, and file interchange can be problematic (fonts in Archicad, for instance). Your hardware choices are much narrower than with PCs. However, if you want to take on running Macs, it is possible.

Avoid using Macs in school, however, since you will want to be able to try out a variety of work flows and you don’t want to be closed off from any possibility. Although they can run Windows, at this point PC hardware is good enough that the balance of reasoning has tipped away from using Macs with both macOS and Windows.

Another note, Macs will be switching away from their current processor architecture. Right now, that architecture is shared between PCs and Macs (called x86, with Intel making Apple’s chips). This similarity enables Macs to run Bootcamp, which is a system that allows Windows 10 to run on the Mac. This is being discontinued, and future Mac workflows will need to be Mac-only. In addition, the process of transition is difficult, and some key programs may take longer to make the jump than others. Most of the programs in the workflow will be updated, but how quickly remains to be seen. For now, you can use the PC + Mac workflow above and deliver pretty good sized projects.

Visualization Focused Alternatives

For CPU rendering, choose the iMac Pro with 18 cores or the Mac Pro with 16, 24, or 28 cores. For GPU rendering, choose the eGPU or the Mac Pro with 2x Vega II Duo cards. Connecting an eGPU to an iMac or MacBook Pro is the most cost effective option for rendering, but requires a GPU renderer, which are poorly supported on macOS. Twinmotion is available now, Octane is releasing soon, and Red Shift has promised support. Lumion and Enscape will not run macOS. It may be worth considering purchasing PCs with an NVIDIA GPUs for your visualization artists, even if you run Macs in the rest of the office. Look to spend as little as $3,000 on a realtime visualization focused GPU-rendering PC computer.