Student Architecture Workstation £1000 (~$1500)

[agrieveson]

A new build for an Architecture student with 4 years of study remaining. Replacing an ageing MacBook Pro. Stability is a priority, so no overclocking. NO gaming. Aiming to be as silent as possible.

Budget Range: Around £900 (~$1400)

System Usage: Autodesk Revit, AutoCAD and 3ds Max (rendering with Vray), Trimble Sketchup, Creative Suite 6 (Mainly Photoshop and Illustrator). NO gaming.

Monitors: 2560 x 1440 (Dell U2711) and 1920x1080 (Samsung BX2340)

Currently thinking:

-Xeon E3-1240 v2 (£204.11)

-Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H (£77.98)

-Samsung 128GB 830 Series SSD (£83.00)

-Seagate 3TB Barracuda HDD (7200RPM 64MB) (£114.99)

-Corsair XMS3 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-10666 (Possibly 32GB?) (£81.82)

-Samsung SH-S222AB 22x DVD±RW DL (£15.32)

-Silverstone Raven 3 (£125.99)

-Noctua NH-D14 (maybe this is overkill for the Xeon though going for silence as a priority?) (£56.79)

-600W Silverstone Strider PSU ST60F-P (600W is my guess at what is suitable for this system) (£78.79)

Total: £838.79 (~$1300)

-Windows 7 64bit Profesional OEM (Already purchased)

-Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 (Already purchased)

This is a new build from scratch and nothing is set in stone, I am open to any suggestions.

[RickyTick]

Welcome to the forums.

I have to admit that I'm not terribly familiar with building this kind of workstation. I do know however that the sweet spot for an SSD is the 256gb version, and the Samsung 830 is a top choice.