New Workstation

[engd]

I have been given the opportunity to spec a new workstation. Currently I have a Dell Precision 690, dual 3.72Ghz Xeon w/ 3gb RAM and a Quadro FX 4500, running 32bit XP. For some of our large machines this is barely enough. Even with simplified models, top level drawings can take 30mins or else crash swks.
The new workstation will be 64bit and can be configured however I want. It has to be a Dell.
Since our parts are almost all simple prismatic shapes I am thinking I should go with a step or two down from the highest available quadro (4600 vs 5600), and max out my CPU (3.13GHz vs 2.5GHz) and 8GB RAM. Does a RAID 0 setup offer any real advantage?
Others here feel we should go with the 5600 and 2.5GHz CPU
Anyone have any experience or recommendations.

 

[JMirisola]

Do a search for workstations. This topic has been covered a multitude of times.

Jeff Mirisola, CSWP
Certified DriveWorks AE

http://designsmarter.typepad.com/jeffs_blog

Dell M90, Core2 Duo
4GB RAM
Nvidia 3500M

 

[Theophilus]

Are you frequently using your processors to the max (see in Task Manager)? If so, there's a bottleneck you'll want to overcome. Essentially, you'll want to look at the items like graphic artifacts on your monitor, RAM peaks, and processors to see where your bottlenecks are to determine what would best help speed up your process.

Other indicators might be assembly sizes, part complexity, etc. SolidWorks makes use of multi-core processing only in limited areas (big area is rendering in PhotoWorks), so the additional cores traditionally won't help quite as much in modeling as a single super-fast core. However, if you tend to run lots of crap in the background (like I do) the additional cores can help float everything with more stability.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reason trumps all. And awe transcends reason.

 

[StefanHamminga]

Don't listen to those others then, you are right, go for cpu speed! Other than that Jeff's right, plenty of topics about it (and I replied in a lot of them, so either search or click my name and you'll get a good list of topics to start with).

Stefan Hamminga
EngIT Solutions
CSWP/Mechanical designer
Searching Eng-Tips forums

 

[JMirisola]

Um, which Jeff?

Jeff Mirisola, CSWP
Certified DriveWorks AE

http://designsmarter.typepad.com/jeffs_blog

Dell M90, Core2 Duo
4GB RAM
Nvidia 3500M

 

[Theophilus]

Yes.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reason trumps all. And awe transcends reason.

 

[StefanHamminga]

I was referring to Jeff M.

Stefan Hamminga
EngIT Solutions
CSWP/Mechanical designer
Searching Eng-Tips forums

 

[Theophilus]

Never mind me (us)--listen to Stefan. If you search his posts, you'll see some amazing stuff on this topic.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reason trumps all. And awe transcends reason.

 

[JMirisola]

Agreed. Stefan is wicked smaht when it comes to computahs!

Jeff Mirisola, CSWP
Certified DriveWorks AE

http://designsmarter.typepad.com/jeffs_blog

Dell M90, Core2 Duo
4GB RAM
Nvidia 3500M

 

[mikedee42]

Hi There,
You mentioned the use od a RAID 0. I run this set up at home currently. When it's running it is very fast to access data and to write, however given it's name, it is not a true redundant device. Because you run one striped pair of hard disks, half of your data is on one disk and the other half resides on the other disk. If one disk goes bad, your data is half gone. I would reccommend a RAID 5(min 3 disks) or 0+1(4 disks). I use a RAID 5 with 3 disks at work and soon will be upgrading to a RAID 5 at home as well.

Regards
Mike

 

[dogarila]

IMHO the workstation you have right now is pretty good. You may need to change XP32 to XP64, use SWx64 and add more memory (4-8GB). Anna Wood has a benchmark page(

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pz7wTpIkC7LA28ybEyxyTPw)with

a list of people and their computer performance. You can see where you are compared with the rest of people out there.