Get me that new computer…I need to BIM


Excellent series by Robert Green at Cadalyst about BIM adoption, hurdles and implementation. Part IV talks bout using a hamster wheel while trying to model, or in more specific terms, a 3-4 year old 32-bit XP or god help you Vista box.  How often in a day are you watching that spinning wheel, what’s it add up to?  A reader quoted in the article gives us this shot of sanity.

“Right now, we’re paying our architectural designers a lot of money to work on a machine that can’t run our BIM software without locking up. If each architect costs us $50/hour (in wages, benefits, and overhead) and loses two hours per week due to computer problems, then it costs us $4,800 per year ($50/hr x 2 hr/wk x 48 wk/yr) to have him or her work on an old workstation because we ‘can’t afford’ to spend $2,700 on a capable machine.”

So what do you say to that management.  Give the people what they want, and what they want, is at least a “Xeon dual quad-core machines equipped with 12 GB of RAM and a mid-level graphics accelerator”  and you know what, popping over to Dell for a quick configure with the following stats:

Dual Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5606, 2.13GHz, 8M L3, 4.8GT

12GB, DDR3 RDIMM Memory, 1333MHz, ECC (6 DIMMS)

1GB ATI FirePro V5800, Triple MON, 2 DP & 1 DVI

Comes in at $2839, if you bought the RAM from Tiger Direct or similar vendor you could chop the price down, and maybe video card as well, however, upgrade to 2GB Quaddro Card will add $500, regardless you are still coming in under the labor replacement, and you can write off this capital investment and, not to mention the increased productivity.  Go get the people what they want.  Tell Dell I sent you, maybe they’ll give me a t-shirt.

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