Computer Upgrade

[cadman1997]

Hello Everybody

A couple of months ago I purchased a computer for home. At the time I did not think that I would put SW on it but, now I'm thinking about doing it. The computer that I purchased was as follows.

Gateway GM5045H
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
nVIDIA GeForce 6200 Video Card
1Gb DDR RAM
250Gb 7200 Hard Drive
10/100 Mbps Ethernet LAN
21" LCD Flat Panel Monitor (FPD2185W)

I'm thinking about the following upgrades for SW.

Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2
nVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 Video Card
1Gb DDR RAM
Seagate 500Gb 7200 16 Mb SATA Hard Drive

I would like to know what you think about my upgrades and is there anything else that I should do. Thank you for your comments.

Cheers,

Ralph Wright, CSWP
SolidWorks 2005, SP5.0
P4, 2.53Ghz
1.5 Gb RAM
ATI Fire GL8800 Card
Windows 2000 Pro

 

[ctopher]

Depending on what type of work you do and large/complicated the assy's are, you may consider going to 2Gb RAM.

Chris
Systems Analyst, I.S.
SolidWorks 06 4.1/PDMWorks 06
AutoCAD 06
ctopher's home (updated 06-21-05)

 

[cadman1997]

ctopher

Thanks for your comments. I have 1Gb of RAM now and plan on adding another 1Gb of RAM.

Cheers,

Ralph Wright, CSWP
SolidWorks 2005, SP5.0
P4, 2.53Ghz
1.5 Gb RAM
ATI Fire GL8800 Card
Windows 2000 Pro

 

[DonSund]

Ralph,

Looks good!

2 gigs is good for modeling for most stuff. If doing FEA 4 gigs is a must esp with FlowWorks. If you are looking at going to 2006 you may want to think about xp 64. Solidworks xp 64 kicks heiny. I have gotten it to act weird where it should crash but never crashed yet.

But, printer drivers are not so fun. Our HP 2800 has no correct xp 64 drivers. DesignJet has to be printed directly to, not through server. No Adobe Acrobat, you still have the save as pdf but for other programs not released yet by Adobe.

Don

 

[ctopher]

I worked with an engineer that did a lot of FEA CosmosWorks and FloWorks. A complicated assy usually took all night to run. When he switched to 4Gb, Dual Proc, XP 64, it then usually took approx 10-30 min ... depending on the model.

Chris
Systems Analyst, I.S.
SolidWorks 06 4.1/PDMWorks 06
AutoCAD 06
ctopher's home (updated 06-21-05)

 

[Theophilus]

If you've already got a system to upgrade, you've already got a 32-bit version of Windows. Perhaps you can configure it for dual-boot so you can actually do normal work with the computer in 32-bit mode while getting extremem performance in 64-bit land.

Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reason trumps all. And awe trumps reason.

 

[cadman1997]

Thank you all for your comments. I was thinking about Windows XP 64-bit.

ctopher, I remember a thread where you talked about the improvement with Windows XP 64-bit. That was why I was thinking about it.

Again thanks for all assistance.

Cheers,

Ralph Wright, CSWP
SolidWorks 2005, SP5.0
P4, 2.53Ghz
1.5 Gb RAM
ATI Fire GL8800 Card
Windows 2000 Pro

 

[foxbat1979]

We're running on HP XW9300 workstations with single Opteron 250, Nvidia Quadro FX1400,two gigs of RAM and two SCSI Raid 0 harddrives. We are very happy with this configuration and maybe even more with the HP 2335 widescreen panels that came along with it

Regards,
Mark
Sr. Design Engineer
SW 2006 premium user