Like most software developers, Autodesk maintains a list of system requirements for various versions of AutoCAD that can be used to help ensure the hardware in your system will work with AutoCAD. However, most “pc requirements” lists tend to cover the required hardware, not what hardware would actually give the best performance. In addition, some lists can be outdated, list old hardware revisions, or simply outright list sub-optimal hardware.
Because of how inconsistent those lists can be, we’ve taken the time to perform testing to determine what hardware runs AutoCAD the best. Based on this testing, we have come up with our own list of recommended hardware for AutoCAD.
When it comes to CPUs there are two main specifications that define the capability of a CPU:
Whether a higher frequency or higher core count is faster depends on how well a program is designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores.
The majority AutoCAD tasks are only single threaded so it is only able to utilize a single core of the CPU. For this reason, our general recommendation when choosing a processor is to get the highest frequency. For current generation CPUs, that is Intel’s Core i9 or i7 K-series, both of which offer high clock speeds alongside a good number of cores (for multitasking, etc).
The only exceptions to the single thread limitation in AutoCAD are 2D Regeneration and Mental Ray rendering (source). 2D Regeneration is not an especially intensive task, so it should not really be a consideration when choosing a CPU, but if you do a lot of rending using Mental Ray you may want to choose a higher core count CPU. In this case, we recommend looking at our various Rendering workstations instead.
Drafting in AutoCAD is not able to utilize more than a handful of cores. We have found that a CPU with the highest operating frequency will give you the best overall performance for general modeling tasks. Intel’s mainstream Core i7 models offer very high single-core clock speed, without a high price, so that is our go-to recommendation.
In the past, Xeon CPUs were more robust than their Core-series counterparts. Today, however, there is very little functional difference between the two Intel product families for applications like AutoCAD. Xeons models are not available with as high of clock speeds as well, and since that directly impacts AutoCAD performance we recommend sticking with a Core series CPU.
In general, we do not recommend overclocking for any professional workstation. Typically, the modest performance gains are not worth the downsides associated with overclocking which can include instability, shorter hardware lifespan, and potential data inaccuracies.
