Grade this PC Set-Up

[Slagathor]

First, the usage:

Solidworks: Complete integrated product line development using PDM and a Configurator like DriveWorks or Tacton. This will be an ongoing project...2-4 years. Average product will have about 30-50 components...not including basic std fasteners:
-Approx 200 Base Models for configurator use
-Sub Assemblies
-Assemblies
-Model data will be linked back to Excel sheets for design validation (many calcs for this product are easy...pre-canned analytical calcs are faster than messing with FEA)
-Mfg drawings (Fab and Machine)
-Basic dimension drawings and section drawings (not toleranced or with machining/fab details) for customer review and O&M documentation.
-Most componenets are simple turned parts, pipe fabs, with some key componenents having very subtle and sophisticated surfaces.

ACAD 2D: Legacy Drawing Usage, etc

The normal Office application (Excel/Word/PPoint)

Specialized iterative design software that has fairly intensive floating point calcs / number crunching....not FEA...but similar

Some rendering

For personal use (not that I will ever have any free time), I will also probably be doing some video editing and photo editing (HD)

That said...here is the system:
SuperMicro SuperWorkstation 7046A-3 Tower/4U DP Xeon 5500
(2) Intel Xeon E5540 Quad Core 2.53GHz CPUs
(2) 4GB DDR3-1333 Registered ECC Memory (8GB total)
Boot/Execution/Operating System Drive - (1) Seagate SAS 146 GB Cheetah 15.6K RPM ST3146356SS HDD
Storage Drive Array - (3) Seagate SATA 1.5TB Barracuda 7200 RPM ST31500341AS HDD in RAID 5
Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7240S-OB 24X SATA DVDRW
PNY NVidia Quadro FX1800
OS = Windows 7, 64 Bit
MS Office Standard (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
ACAD LT

Comments?

 

[GRF]

What is with the ACAD LT.

The speech seems pretty good, not sure if you will get full use out of a quad core processor though. SW only really needs 1 core as most CAD is very linear. If you were running simulations or doing hard core video editing you might get more out of the quad core but for now I think you will actually hurt your performance going to a quad core processor over a dual core.

 

[kellnerp]

I second the multi core. Unless you are doing PhotoWorks rendering it isn't going to help. A dual core may help if you can get Windoze to properly share the load.

And the Xeon. I think Anna Wood probably can tell you what the hottest CPU's are and I don't think Xeon is that chip.

TOP
CSWP, BSSE

http://www.engtran.com

http://www.niswug.org

"Node news is good news."

 

[Theophilus]

Xeons are pricey, but not terribly good performers with SolidWorks. Although they've got some recent types out now, so that might be out-of-date. Check with Anna Wood's comments and benchmark stuff here, at her blog, and at the "official" SW forum.

Trade all those extra cores for increase to clock speed, and you'll have a faster system.

And you might want to look into the bang/buck ratio for that DDR3 RAM. Would you pay 300% more for 20% performance gains (not sure if those numbers are right, but early reviews were a bit negative because of the poor ratio).

I'd question the Quadro cards based on all the extreme trouble folks have had in the last two releases of SolidWorks. Look into AMD (weird, eh?). I've got an AMD FireGL v5600 (nearly two years old) and it does great with v2007, v2008 and v2009 of SolidWorks.

Check out reviews at Cadalyst.com to get some ideas on how tested systems (and their components) fared in benchmarks.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.

 

[007bondy]

I would second the quadro cards comments at the moment nvida has a lot of design issues to work out and some of them have to do with inferior components crapping out under medium strength use so be aware .
Get as much ram as you can cram
and at the moment as the others have said a good dual core over clocked would be better than a low clocked quad core .
But in saying that, for renderings and animation a good clocked quadie (3.4ghz+) would never go amiss.
An amd 965 can be OC to over 4ghz on moderate air cooling and its bang for buck is way better than Intel high end offerings
Oh and most importantly enjoy your new toy

 

[AnnaWood]

If you are building your own computer the speed kings are Core i7 cpu's. Max out your RAM, Get x64 bit Windows 7 OS (I would wait a couple weeks to be able to buy Win7)

Nvidia Quadro or ATI FirePro for your video card.

Get the fastest clockspeed cpu you can afford, then compromise on the other hardware.

You can see benchmarks on my blog at

http://www.solidmuse.com

links in the right sidebar.

Cheers,

Anna Wood
Anna Built Workstation, Core i7 EE965, FirePro V8700, 12 gigs of RAM, OCZ Vertex 120 Gig SSD
SW2009 SP3.0, Windows 7 RC1

http://www.solidmuse.com

http://www.phxswug.com