Gonna build a Solidworks Rig From Scratch 1

[overkill4]

Hi All,

So I'm going to take the video gamers route and build my computer from scratch. I got tired of trying to "customize" my computer online and decided if I really wanted to get what I wanted I'd have to build it myself.

I'll be posting my endeavor in this forum since the end goal is an excellent scalable Solidworks machine.

Please feel free to contribute your two cents, but don't be offended if I don't take it.

The components that I will need to buy are.

1) Tower
2) Nvidia Quadro Video Card/Cards??
3) Motherboard and CPU
4) 1 Hard Drive, to run windows and applications off of. I already have 2 500GB drives to use as archives.

I'm going to transfer all of my peripherals and bells and whistles off of my current computer so what I'm looking for is really just the guts.

Now some questions.

1) Should the tower and motherboard be big enough to eventually expand to a triple SLI configuration. Can Solidworks even deal with 3 graphics cards.

2) Should I update the ram. I have 4Gb so do I need to? I don't deal with massive assemblies but I do do lots of rendering work. Does Solidworks really take advantage of Ram speed, or just the quantity.

Any other thoughts or experiences will be appreciated.

Cheers

60% of the time, it works every time.

 

[rfus]

why triple SLI? brings up the question is one good graphics card better than three crappy cheap ones.

i7 is still overpriced at this point. if you can afford it, go for it i guess. one will tend though, when buying/builing computer for components to start to get taken by the hype. next thing you know you are sold on triple-sli and i7 CPU, and you will pay more than you need to to accomplish your job. How often do you find yourself waiting for stuff to rebuild? I render twice a month maybe, and Photoview has made this much quicker.

The motherboard you show is not actually an NVIDIA board per say. There are all kinds of mobo manufacturers using NVIDIA's chips (XFX, Asus, EVGA).

Go on newegg and build up a hypothetical system with specs and pricing. Post it here and i'm sure you'll get some good feedback.

Too bad you don't live in U.S. If you are using this computer as your primary business tool for your self employment engineering services, it is possible that it could be written off in one year with a section 179 deduction.

 

[Pud]

Loads up all of MS office in 0.5s, 700MB DVD rip in 0.8s, transfer rate over 2GB/s. Should open assemblies pretty quick.

http://www.geekologie.com/2009/03/what_ifyou_raided_24_ssds_toge.php

Harry

http://www.tynevalleyplastics.co.uk

 

[overkill4]

Yah I'm not looking to drop in 3 crap cards. My work has a professional development fund which I could fund the card purchases with. I just want the room for expansion.

I'm gonna put together a selection this weekend and well see what tumbles out of it

60% of the time, it works every time.

 

[overkill4]

While I can't quite afford 24 SSD's that is still very impressive Pud.

Here is the build so far:

XI Base Workstation Config
Upgrades And Options:

Intel i7 920
6144MB Patriot™ Viper 9-9-9-24 DDR3 @1333MHz
Quadro FX 3700 to be added initially. More to follow
Samsung T240
64GB Solid State Drive Patriot Warp SATAII
Vist 64
EVGA X58 MOBO
1100 W Coolermaster PS
Tower COOLER MASTER HAF 932
Total - $2386

60% of the time, it works every time.

 

[overkill4]

For those of you wondering where I'm at in the build here's an update on what I'm starting with.

Motherboard - EVGA X58 SLI
Processor - Intel i7 920
Ram - 6Gb OCZ OCZ3P1600LV6GK
Hard Drive - 2 x Samsung HE753LJ in a Raid 0 Config
Tower - Coolermaster HAF
Graphics - Nvidia Quadro 3700

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. I'll be starting to assemble once the tower arrives.

Cheers



60% of the time, it works every time.

 

[dieterle]

Don't Raid 0, its a stupid idea. You will not see any real world performance increase. Anyone that tells you differently is MISINFORMED. Do your research.

Solidworks is a single threaded application that does mostly linear calculations. Having multiple cores is not helpful but doing quick floating point calculations is. For Solidworks, MORE GHZ = BETTER.

For renderings (including Photoworks), and most other software, multiple cores are extremely helpful.

Research your video card, last I checked there were extreme diminishing returns on anything over FX570 to the point of getting a faster card is pointless.

 

[overkill4]

What research are you refering to on regards to the raid? I do mostly photoworks not large assemblies so multicore is what I need.

60% of the time, it works every time.

 

[dieterle]

Raid 0 only provides faster speed for sustained file transfers, for burst reads it can actually be slower, also depending on your raid controller you have system resources taken up. For the small amount of disk access Solidworks does (especially if you don't use large assemblies) its completely pointless. This is on top of making your data more vulnerable to disk crashes.

All solidworks features and operations are single threaded(extruding, sketching etc). So having a high speed single core is important for doing any modeling work.

I would definitely invest in a backup solution of some kind if I were you (off site and automated), if you still want to do raid 0, spend some cash and go raid 0+1.

 

[overkill4]

Thanks dieterle. I was aware of the hard disk crash issue but not the burst data issue. I think I'll just format my disks to separate windows and my data.

Has anybody run an Nvidia 3700 card vs. a 570? Is the cost worth it? I'm leaning towards the 3700 since the 570 can't be used in SLI. And the main goal is that my system can be built upon later.

Thanks






60% of the time, it works every time.

 

[AnnaWood]

overkill4.

Nvidia has a new generation of cards. You want to be looking at the FX580, FX1800 or FX3800.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html

Cheers,

Anna Wood
SW2008 SP5.0, Windows Vista SP1
IBM ThinkPad T61p, T7800, FX570M, 4 gigs of RAM

http://www.solidmuse.com

http://www.phxswug.com

 

[dieterle]

Trying to future proof your machine is usually a bad idea. By the time you feel like you want to add an extra graphics card to SLI, your existing hardware will all be obsolete. Its always cheaper to buy upper-mid range hardware and completely replace most of it every few years. Buy 2nd Tier hardware (not bleeding edge, best bang for buck), and plan for obsolescence in 2-4 years.


SLI does not exist as a pathway to future upgrades, its meant to be used NOW to chain multiple cards together.

 

[overkill4]

Well the machine is up and running well. I want to put together some benchmarks.

Where do I find a good Solidworks Benchmark?

Thanks



60% of the time, it works every time.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Top of the second column at

http://www.solidmuse.com/

 

[overkill4]

So far so good.

First rebuild 16.22s.

Next run with the Quadro 570

60% of the time, it works every time.