Dell Precision 490 system specs - any thoughts?

[christhorn82]

Hi there, thanks for taking the time to help.

I'm to get a new Dell workstation at work with a budget of around £2000. I've specced the following system and would appreciate some comments (i.e. over the top, lacking in certain areas...)

I tend to work with assemblies of 500-1000 parts and recently have started more intensive rendering and COSMOS work.

Base system: Dell Precision 490 with Windows XP Pro x64
CPU: Intel Xeon 5345 (2.33GHz, 1333MHz, 2x4MB) quad-core
Memory: 4GB DDR2 667MHz quad-channel FBD RAM (4x1GB)
Graphics card: nVIDIA Quadro FX3500 256MB
Hard drive: 73GB 15,000rpm SAS HDD

I want the machine to be quite future-proof, hence I think the Dell 490 has space for a second CPU?

Also, with eight DIMM slots for RAM, I was wondering which would be better performance-wise - 4x1GB or 8x512MB?

Lastly, the Intel Xeon 5160 (3.00GHz, 1333MHz, 4MB) is the same price as the quad-core E5345 - which processor is likely to give the best performance now and over the next couple of years?

(I've referred to

http://www.cpubenchmark.net

in choosing the CPU...)

Thanks very much for the help,

Chris Thorn

 

[christhorn82]

I'm no expert but when you're paying $1200 for a Quadro FX card I think the amount of memory (256MB) is one of the less significant features of the card...

My home PCs video card is 512MB, but it there's no comparison between it and one of the nVIDIA Quadro FX cards...

If you're solely looking at the amount of memory, the next step up is (I guess) the nVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 with 512MB memory, but that's $2000-3000 for the card alone.