Hardware bits and pieces for SW 1

[Theophilus]

Anyone know about bits and pieces? My system just met its match in creating a mold core for an optical part with thousands of parabolic features. It did great (stability), but took too many hours.

I need to upgrade my chip and RAM with motherboard, but otherwise am OK with my box. Any recommendations about RAM type and AMD vs. Intel regarding SolidWorks? Good motherboard brands that aren't necessarily catering to gamers? I plan to buy and assemble the components and need everything to be compatible (of course).

Thanks,




Jeff Mowry
DesignHaus Industrial Design

http://www.designhaus-i-d.com

 

[Theophilus]

One more thing I forgot to ask about, but have seen some miscellaneous comments about. I currently use Win 2000 Pro (SP 3) and have found it to be very stable. Any point in moving to XP Pro for now? I haven't yet seen any advantage and XP Home is quite a disappointment in my opinion except for the roll-back feature if you accidentally hose your system with a change (very nice).

Any thoughts?




Jeff Mowry
DesignHaus Industrial Design

http://www.designhaus-i-d.com

 

[JimSym]

The Intel 875P for the P4 and the nVidia nForce2 Ultra 400 for the Athlon are the chipsets of choice. Both support dual channel DDR400 memory and rock. Top-end P4 systems are fastest, but top-end Athlon systems offer better price/performance. If you'll be running NC programming software on the same system, go with the Athlon. As for brands, Asus and MSI are always safe buys, albeit expensive.

Whichever platform you choose, make sure your power supply is fully supported. Power requirements for new systems are very specific and most older power supplies don't measure up. This is a case where size does NOT matter. If your power supply isn't fully certified for the new chipset and CPU, replace it. You might want to verify that your case will provide proper cooling, too. If there is any doubt, replace it as well.

 

[JNR]

We found XP Pro to be noticeably faster - once you customize it to get rid of all the stupid CPU overhead gizmos.

(I think it's System-Advanced-Performance or something like that.) Your will find a whole list of cra... er, stuff - no, I do really mean crap! like "Cursor shadows"!!! Turn 'em all off except the last one which makes XP look like XP rather than 2000. They are just dragging your CPU down with constant overhead. (you would think some would be offloaded to graphics hardwear, but noooo....). Thanks, Mr. Gates, but no thanks - trash the twee stuff if it costs us speed.

3/4 of all the Spam produced goes to Hawaii - shame that's not true of SPAM also.......

 

[Rocko]

Check my faq559-651 you will find that there is very little difference performance wise between XP Home and XP PRO.

 

[JNR]

However, there are (albeit obscure for many people's needs) limitations to XP Home.

Just another personal persective - if you have to have special patches to make something run on "look-alike" processors, I prefer to stick with the real thing (Intel, for better or worse in this case).

Also, if you change graphics boards without question go for a Quadro series product. That's what SW baselined 2004 development on (and seems to be the among the best options technically for 2003 also).

3/4 of all the Spam produced goes to Hawaii - shame that's not true of SPAM also.......

 

[Mindnumb]

If you have the time, wait until Nforce3 chopset an athlon 64 is her (23 september) I have seen benchmarks popping up more and more now, and it seems the p4 is no match for it.

In 32 bit mode.

As far as 64 bit goes, performance should be even a little better, but only time will show, and who knows when solidworks is ported to 64 bit...

 

[Theophilus]

Thanks for all the feedback. It's difficult to jump into a commitment to purchase when the scene seems to change for the better so quickly.

Perhaps this 64-bit processor will give AMD an edge?




Jeff Mowry
DesignHaus Industrial Design

http://www.designhaus-i-d.com

 

[MadMango]

The electronics scene is nothing more than a leap-frog game. Whoever is in the lead today won't be there for very long. If you wait for the next best thing, you will be stuck in a cycle of continual waiting.

The best thing to do is read and research, and make an educated leap, hoping that your choice will provide effective productivity for 12-24 months.

MadMango
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[Mindnumb]

I always find benchmarks very useful, take a look at these numbers. Comments are worth a read.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1856&p=7

 

[Mindnumb]

And here is the viewperf scores for my system

Nforce 2 motherboard
xp prosessor @2200 mhz
Radeon 9500pro With Firegl patched drivers
2x256 mb DDR 3200 Ram
WinXp

Run All Summary

---------- SUM_RESULTS\3DSMAX\SUMMARY.TXT
3dsmax-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 15.99

---------- SUM_RESULTS\DRV\SUMMARY.TXT
drv-08 Weighted Geometric Mean = 71.25

---------- SUM_RESULTS\DX\SUMMARY.TXT
dx-07 Weighted Geometric Mean = 103.1

---------- SUM_RESULTS\LIGHT\SUMMARY.TXT
light-05 Weighted Geometric Mean = 25.35

---------- SUM_RESULTS\PROE\SUMMARY.TXT
proe-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 21.02

---------- SUM_RESULTS\UGS\SUMMARY.TXT
ugs-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 22.28

 

[rtrnka]

After experimenting with several different processors, ram, and motherboards. We have found that this configuration works best for us:
MSI Pro 694D motherboard
2- 1.0+ Ghz Pentium III processors
Minimum of 1.5 GB RAM
Any Quatro Video Card/Elsa Gloria III in systems running smaller assemblies or have less requirements for performance.
Windows 2000 Pro.

We found that the overall performance was much better using a higher end graphics card and for large assemblies more ram is always better. The second processor is something that most will tell you does not get a good utilization by Solid Works; but we found is that it provides dedicated processing power when other tasks (such as PDM or other software functions) are being performed at the same time, overall system stability is increased significantly.

Rich Trnka
CSWP
MGS Machine Corp