The brief from Kingsley Architects was clear: their team of eight was spending a collective 25 hours per week waiting on renders. Projects were slipping. Clients were getting impatient. The bottleneck was not talent — it was hardware.
Their existing setup: three-year-old Intel Core i5-9400F machines with 16GB RAM and GTX 1660 graphics cards. Capable when purchased, but increasingly inadequate as project complexity grew. A single high-quality Lumion 12 scene was taking 2.5 hours to render on the lead architect's machine.
The Assessment
We spent an afternoon reviewing their actual project files, not just talking about specs. The key bottlenecks were:
- GPU-limited real-time viewport performance in Lumion (causing constant lag during design review)
- CPU-limited final render output (Lumion uses CPU for some passes, GPU for others)
- RAM-limited BIM file handling in Revit — multiple linked models were causing crashes at 16GB
What We Built
We configured four new workstations based on their actual software load, not a generic "workstation" spec:
- Intel Core i7-14700K (high single-threaded performance for Revit viewport)
- 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM (Revit headroom, no more crashes on large linked models)
- NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB (Lumion real-time performance, enough VRAM for complex scenes)
- 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 primary + 4TB secondary (project file storage local to each machine)
- 850W 80+ Platinum PSU, 360mm AIO cooling
The Results
The same Lumion scene that took 2.5 hours now completes in 38 minutes. Revit with three linked models — previously a guarantee of a crash — now loads cleanly and navigates without hesitation.
The team's collective render wait time dropped from 25 hours per week to under 6. That is 19 hours reclaimed every week across the firm. At billing rates, the systems paid for themselves in under two months.