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Dream Machine

Dream Machine

Dream Machine

(OP)
Hi
1st time here
I have to build a client a couple of machines that is the absolute top of the line.  A quick description of what I was thinking would be the FX3400 PCIE 256MB DDR3 vid card..
ATHLON 64 X2 DC 4800+ S939 ..@ 4 GB ram.. sataII  ..

anything anyone would add to that to make it better for solidworks?

RE: Dream Machine

If your clients are using CosmosWorks (or considering it) then you should not use the AMD 64, because Cosmos does not support the AMD 64 and they are not suppose too until CosmosWorks08.

FYI - DC will not improve SW performance even on 64 bit the only main improvement going to 64 bit is the advantage you will get with Memory. Speed will not be improved much at all.

I am sure I will be getting questions on the above statements.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Dream Machine

(OP)
I am not sure if they are using CW but I can find that out on Monday.  CW must be part of SW .. mind my ignorance :) .. all I know is that they have Solidworks 2k5 and they do upgrade their software alot.  So they will be using it if it is part of Solidworks.  So I should probably get the ATHLON 64 X2 DC 4800+ S939 so they can support it in the future, is what I am thinking.. Or would the Opteron be the best way to go.. and the client does not want more than 1 processor on the motherboard.. that is just the way they are.. so it would have to be the opteron150 or along that lines i guess..

RE: Dream Machine

Cosmos is a purchased product and does not come with SW unless you purchased it. You need to find out before making those machines.

Quote:

So they will be using it if it is part of Solidworks.  So I should probably get the ATHLON 64 X2 DC 4800+ S939 so they can support it in the future, is what I am thinking..

What? if they have Cosmos they will not be able to use it because Cosmos "Will NOT Run on the the AMD 64" If they don't have Cosmos it they will not be a problem.

However if they plan to purchase it, you will need to make them aware of this Limitation with the AMD64 chips... because if you don't you maybe held respondisble, because you are aware now of this limitation.

Quote:

and the client does not want more than 1 processor on the motherboard..that is just the way they are..

And why should they... SW does not support Dual CPU's (it's not multi-threaded) so it would be pointless in having them unless they had other software that they wanted to run outside of SW.

The only 2 left are the Opteron or the Intel, those are the only 2 left to decide from if they have Cosmos.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Dream Machine

The caveat here is that if you do a lot of renderings, multiple processors help tremendously with rendering.


Jeff Mowry
www.industrialdesignhaus.com
Reality is no respecter of good intentions.

RE: Dream Machine

(OP)
So the question here is.. Will solidworks and cosmos work with ATHLON 64 X2 DC 4800+ S939?  Or will it just blue screen and crash all the time?  If it works but just doesn't utilize the dual processor, then that would be fine because they do use other software that would take advantage.  

RE: Dream Machine

I can say for sure that SolidWorks 2006 runs very well on an AMD X2 4800+.  I built a system for use at home, and it really flies.  There are only small parts of SolidWorks 2006 that will utilize 2 cores/CPUs, such as drawing view generation, but PhotoWorks definitely benefits greatly from a dual core processor.  I am amazed at how fast I can render things with global illumination cranked up, shadow quality turned up a bit, anti-aliasing turned up, etc...  If you tend to multi-task alot with your PC, then dual core is of great advantage.  I really have no lag time with my PC.  It really depends on what you do with your PC and what programs you use to get your work done.  I would think that as SolidWorks goes forward, they would make the software multi-threaded as Processors have kind of hit the wall in terms of clock speed lately and gone the route of multiple cores and better power management.  Time will only tell if SolidWorks takes advantage of this, but I would think all CAD companies would have to at some point in order to compete with each other in terms of performance.  For programs that are already multi-threaded, you would be very happy with a dual core system.

Pete

RE: Dream Machine

sludg3

In your first post you make no mention about the Mother Board. No matter what processer you end up choosing do not over look the mother board and the chip sets that they use. This can make a diffrence on how a computer performs.

RE: Dream Machine

I would also like to know the issues with Cosmosworks and the AMD 64 processor.  I've got an AMD Athlon 64 running CW2005 SP3.0 and have seen no issues.

Is Cosmosworks unsupported in the sense that if I run into a problem then I can expect no help resolving it or is there an inherent problem with the way the software runs on an AMD 64?

Am I potentially seeing incorrect FEA results?  Yikes!!!

Dave Gowans

RE: Dream Machine

dgowans,

I have been and a colleage of mine that supports Cosmos has talked to guys out in Cal. that support CW with SW and they confirmed that the AMD64 will not run Cosmos. If you get it to run then that's great I guess, but you are using an unsupported CPU and they will not be able to support that.

You might want to contact your VAR and have them investigate. If you her something different then please let me know as I would like to know why there would be 2 bits of information being passed out.
______

Dual CPUs has it's advantages and SW takes advantage of Dual CPU's where it can, but not enough to where you will see a much of a difference.

To do that they would have to rewrite the Software completely and they are not going to do that most likely.
______

lazarosgreece,

You need to stop YELLING when you post. Turn of CAPS LOCK, this will make it easier on the rest of us and to also understand you are not yelling.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Dream Machine

Scott,

  I'll check out Cosmos Xpress tonight and see what kind of messages/results I get with my AMD X2 4800+.  I had not been aware of this.  This information is mysteriously missing from the SolidWorks website.  Why would it not run on AMD 64?  Seems to be very much a sore spot then for Cosmos compared to other packages - not running on some of the fastest mainstream hardware??  Won't be supported until 2008 version??  Whats that all about?  Seems like they need to get on the ball.  Maybe I'm way off on this one.

RE: Dream Machine

I don't know about CosmosXpress not running on AMD64... Have not heard anything about that. SW will tell you it is supported, but those guys out at Cosmos directly says it is not. You are not way off on this at all. I was in total Aww about this as well. I think they need to get off there cans and get Cosmos upgraded to work with the AMD chips ASAP.

Best Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Dream Machine

Thanks for the info Scott - agreed about the support.

Pete

RE: Dream Machine

I think a couple of people here need to verify if it was the 64-bit CPU or the 64-bit OS.

Windows XP Pro x64 won't run Cosmos, but the AMD 64-bit & windows XP Pro (32-bit) works great on every machine I tried.

Also check out the SPEC benchmarks:
http://www.spec.org/gpc/opc.data/vp81/sw-perf.html

A lot of opterons here, not? (Opteron is practically equal to high-end Athlon 64 cpu's)

Stefan Hamminga
Mesken BV
2005 Certified SolidWorks Professional
Mechanical designer/AI student

RE: Dream Machine

This is a great discussion, but it needs its own thread.  6 months from now I doubt any of us will remember to search for "Dream Machine" when talking about COSMOS compatibility issues.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

RE: Dream Machine

A tip for the TS: I did some benchmarking with the spec apps and I found memory settings (latency and clock freq.) made a pretty high impact on SW performance (tested on an Athlon 64 4000+ / 2x 1GB RAM).

I would recommend finding the very best (fastest) ram available. Also remember that no application in windows can go past 1,6 (or 2,6 with the 3GB switch on) of memory usage without crashing. So 4GB of ram sounds great, but be sure you can use it (eg. multitasking / windows x64).

Stefan Hamminga
Mesken BV
2005 Certified SolidWorks Professional
Mechanical designer/AI student

RE: Dream Machine

(OP)
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, BIOS version Mct2/Dualcore2
is the motherboard i was thinking..
and it would be the 32-bit version of xppro not 64-bit OS

RE: Dream Machine

According to Cosmos:

Cosmos will not run AMD64 bit CPU's. They never mentioned anything about 64 OS.

I think it was clairfied in the first 2 posts, but I have clarified it once more.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Dream Machine

Ok, my apologies Scott!
I hear these mix-ups between the cpu and running a true 64-bit OS every day & since (strangely) I seem to be able to run cosmos fine on AMD Athlon 64 cpu's on win32...
I'll go and do a some back2back runs between my A64 systems and some Pentium systems to verify the results (previous results compared pretty well)

Stefan Hamminga
Mesken BV
2005 Certified SolidWorks Professional
Mechanical designer/AI student

RE: Dream Machine

I didn't mean anything by my remark in my last post... sory about that... little grumpy I guess today.

If you can prove that Cosmos will run on AMD 64 on both OS 64 and 32. I think you should call Cosmos directly or contact your VAR and have them call you, because I would like to know what the heck is going on...

I have felt since all this 64 bit stuff started people don't know or they are guessing if you have something you think is right, then you should have them look at your example.

Best Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Dream Machine

(OP)
it would be nice to know if Cosmos will run on AMD 64 on both OS 64 and 32 ... which motherboard, cpu, vid card may be the key.. driver versions would be good to know too.  I have contacted Solidworks and all they tell me is look on our website, that is what works.. but have they even tested it?  

RE: Dream Machine

I did a quick test on the cad machine I'm currently installing for my employer and cosmos ran perfectly fine. Mind you, I still need to compare the results to a pentium, but they look fine.

Main System specs (08-11-2005):

CPU:
- AMD Athlon 64 4000+ Socket 939 "San Diego" Core
Mainboard:
- MSI K8N SLI Platinum
Memory:
- 2x 1GB DDR PC3200 CL2.5 Kingston
Hard Drives:
- 2x Western Digital Raptor WD740GD / nVidia RAID1
Video card:
- HP Quadro FX-1400 PCIe


Software:
- Windows XP Professional NL (regular 32-bit, including SP2 and all updates available via windows update)
- Microsoft Office 2003 Professional NL (fully updated as well)
- SolidWorks 2006 Premium SP 1.0
- CosmosWorks SP 1.0
- nTune (see drivers package)

Drivers (in installation order, versions: see package):
- nVidia SATA RAID
- nVidia LAN (without the firewall software)
- AMD CPU driver
- nVidia (beta) video driver

Links:
eDrawing:
http://www.mooload.com/file.php?file=files/1131466139/eDrawing.zip
Drivers:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hamming0/Drivers.zip
Model:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hamming0/Model.zip

Stefan Hamminga
Mesken BV
2005 Certified SolidWorks Professional
Mechanical designer/AI student

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