Avoid AMD Radeon (RX series) cards unless tested. CSI explicitly recommends NVIDIA for hardware acceleration. AMD cards often cause graphical glitches (invisible walls, slow orbit) due to OpenGL driver conflicts.

If your desk is too small, you can only build one floor at a time. In ETABS terms, if you run out of RAM, Windows starts using your SSD as "fake RAM" (Paging). This is called thrashing , and it slows your analysis down by a factor of 100x.

Don't let the IT department buy you a "server" with 32 slow cores. Don't let the gaming store sell you a water-cooled RGB beast with a $2,000 graphics card.