Workstation buying guide

Read the vendor requirement first

Engineering and design vendors publish system requirements and, often, lists of tested graphics hardware. Where your workplace requires certified hardware, that document is the specification and everything else is commentary.

Bring it to us. We would rather build to a published requirement than to a guess, and it removes the most expensive kind of mistake: a machine that works but is not supported.

Then decide which way the work leans

Establish whether your day is mostly modelling — which rewards fast individual cores — or mostly rendering, simulation and analysis, which reward many cores. Specify for whichever you spend more time doing rather than trying to buy the best of both.

Then memory, with room to grow

Check what your current machine reports with your largest file open and specify comfortably above it. Leave free memory slots: models grow, and a workstation that can take more memory in two years is worth more than one that is full on the day it arrives.