[xusnac]

Hello there,

I am a newbie when it comes to CFD and pc hardware.

Which one is better for Ansys mechanical & Fluent and Solidworks: i7 7700 or Xeon E5 1650; GTX 1070 or Quadro P2000? Mostly small geometries and assemblies will be designed.

Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.

[flotus1]

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/ar...orks-2016-751/
One of the rare cases here where I would actually recommend a professional graphics card. The Quadro P2000 is a reasonable choice for your budget and scope of application.
If you dont want to spend more than 400$ on a graphics card that has less raw performance than a GTX 1060 you can try to find a used card from the Maxwell or Kepler architecture.

I guess you meant the Xeon 1650v4 CPU. The Xeon 1650 was introduced back in 2012. And even the v4 version will soon be replaced. If you don't need ECC memory (from my point of view you don't, but not everybody is cool with that) I would recommend the I7-7800x. It has a reasonable price of ~350$, will perform pretty well in CFD thanks to the quad-channel memory controller and is still good enough for CAD due to the high clock speed. Or the I7-7820x (8 cores, ~500$) as a step-up. Pair it with at least 4x8GB of DDR4-2666 or faster memory. And use at least a high-end air cooler, e.g. Noctua NH-D15.

[xusnac]

Hey flotus1,
I actually took up your advice and I build a custom workstation as follows: i7 8700k (it has 6 cores and a high clock speed, just what I needed), Quadro P2000, 16 GB RAM. I will add more RAM soon- but other than that everything is great.

Thanks for your help!

[flotus1]

Just to be clear, my advice was not getting an I7-8700k.
It may be slightly faster for CAD due to the higher clock speed, but it will fall behind in CFD compared to the X299 processors because of the dual-channel memory controller.

But if it works for you, everything is fine.