Hi, the Autodesk site sets out the certified hardware requirements and are more often adopted by larger corporations for support contracts.

With the i7 you can go 3 ways. 1) Newer Skylake series (z170 chipset), uses DDR4 ram - All slightly more expensive as the tech is relatively new. b) slightly older i7 series based on the h97/z97 chipset - processors to go for here would be the 4770k and the 4790k and you can use standard DDR3 ram 3) X99 chipset i7's which would be a 5820k, DDR 4 RAM I believe.

Option 3 would be the most expensive as it uses more expensive X99 chipset boards. The 5820K is also a 6 core (12 threads) chip, but it's great for rendering. It does require a rather beefy cooler though as a 1/2 render will push up the temps quite a bit. I run a little H80i water cooler and keeps temps to 55deg C max while my CPU is pegged out at 4.3GHZ on all cores.

In all honesty, you won't really notice the difference between the older z97 chipset i7's and the newer z170 chipset i7's. Also, DDR4 isn't much faster than DDR3 that you'd notice. However, the z170 chipset will give you slightly better future proofing.

I would suggest as a minimum a quad core (8 thread) CPU.

In terms of RAM, 8GB as an absolute minimum (just for light stuff), 16GB / 32GB suggested if you can afford it. You don't need 64GB unless you get into massive datasets / assets, but its nice to have a board that supports it, but it's not required.

Make sure you get a good power supply, I'd suggest a 750W Silver / Gold PSU. Spend your money once here!

64GB SSD for a startup / system disk, 2x SATA HD for data and backup. Size as required.

Motherboard, depending on the chipset you go for, I'd suggest a Gigabyte board, Asus board or MSI board. I have found Gigabyte and Asus have the best BIOS/ EFI systems and the boards are quite solidly built.

GFX card - You don't need a Quadro card. You can happily run a GTX 970 on Linux The Quadro cards essentially run the same core GPU chip as the gaming cards, the only difference is the Quadro cards run ECC ram, run a little slower clocked but sometimes have more pilelines / shaders enabled. Also, the Quadro cards have a few more driver links but I assume you're not running scientific grade simulation grade CUDA simulations.

The top end GTX 970's go for about £230, if you want to spend more there is a 980 card or a Titan...but I wouldn't bother with the Titan...

Have a read here....

https://blog.digitaltutors.com/top-fi...me-dev-system/

I built a Gigabyte (z97 chipset) based 4Ghz 4790k i7 system a few months ago and it's really great! Can't fault it at all and it's really fast.

You'll save yourself the £120 odd for Windows 8.1 Professional as well by going Linux, but be prepared for a bit more prep work and fiddling with settings.

If you want to chat through things, cases etc. send me a pm and we can chat on the phone if you want

Do you have a monitor? That also needs to come out of the budget....

Jacques

edit: I would refrain from ATI/AMD gfx cards for Linux, the drivers are terrible!!!