Continue to Site

Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations MintJulep on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

NX4 to NX5 Upgrade improvments 3

Status
Not open for further replies.

SiW979

Mechanical
Nov 16, 2007
804
Hello People,

We've been using NX4 now for a little over a year on a 64 bit platform and to be honest we find that it is not a very robust release. We encounter lots of fatal errors and general crashes, not to mention things like motion scenario not working on 64bit machines amongst other things. I've been playing with NX5 and from what I understand from people in other industries is that NX5 is a much better release in terms of it's stability, some even said they had ditched NX4 after 6 months in favour of NX5

So can anyone else share their experiences of NX4 or indeed confirm that NX5 is a better release? Is it worth me pushing forward and swapping to NX5? Has anyone encountered any problems with NX5?

I'm obviously going to perform a proper evaluation as we have over 400 seats of NX here and I need to make sure that it will have a positive impact, but I'm really interested in hearing about anyone who has had similar experiences.

Many thanks inadvance

Simon [ponder]
 
Replies continue below

Recommended for you

Simon,

Early NX-5 was crashworthy but buggy. In other words it crashed seldom, but it had a few problems with the new hole feature that were sorted out in later releases and we're pretty happy with NX-5.0.3.2 and above. Under Teamcenter 10 we continued to have problems especially with some legacy UDF's right up through NX-5.0.2.2.

Another mode of failure was blanking and un-blanking certain files under NX-5.0.2.2 again under Teamcenter 10, causing NX to have fatal errors, we reported it, but I had them install NX-5.0.3.2 and has been fine ever since. That site aren't using workflow so we've been having a few problems with the locks status not refreshing as we might have liked also. I put it down to housekeeping we've been aware that if you operate like that you'll have problems ever since using Teamcenter 9 with NX-3, so no change there.

The systems guys are convinced that if they run the Dell boxes using the as delivered installation with the Google Toolbar then their systems are generally unstable. They have simply ghosted a good installation of their own to get around that one.

My NX-5 experience is more recent so more comments but really running standalone under XP-Pro 32Bit and NX-5.0.3.2 it has been excellent. There were a few problems under Teamcenter 10, but after we sorted it out with the IT guy I got NX-5.0.3.2 and it has been much better since. I would say go ahead and take the upgrade, NX-5 is at the end of it's maintenance releases as NX-6 will soon be on the scene, which means most of the bugs have already been ironed out. Besides you'll be one release short of features if you lag behind in NX-4. NX-6 will be released soon but probably like you I usually wait for at least the first maintenance release before I take the upgrades.

NX-4 by all reports and some limited experience was completely stable on 32Bit systems, but prone to a few crashes under some 64Bit installations, problems with Spaceware drivers compounded some of this. I personally had no problems on XP-Pro 32Bit. I probably only uses it for a couple of hundred hours of modeling and drafting work, but don't recall having serious crashing problems which is probably enough to draw a reasonable conclusion.

Best Regards

Hudson
 
Hudson

Thanks for that info. After playing with NX5 the other day, it seems to me like I would be able to roll it out to our users with minimal training required except for perhaps the new sketch based hole features and one or two others etc. It doesn't look vastly different than NX4? Our policy here is to upgrade every 2 releases in order to keep training time to a minimum, NX6 looks like it will requrie a good whack of training where as NX5, like I mentioned, doesn't look a hell of a lot different. Is this the case d'ya think?

Many thanks

Simon
 
Simon,

NX-5 looks different but isn't that different in terms of needing to learn or re-learn many new or existing functions. So no I don't think it will need a lot of re-training. For what it is worth GM are finally taking up NX-5 after having skipped NX-4, and because they are such an influential customer I take that as a reasonable recommendation.

You may have seen my posts back and forwards with John about the new sketch based hole feature. The temptation is to sketch dimensions from neighboring features, edges mainly, if you're used to using the older style hole feature. However the trick is to place a line or lines, often a rectangle, into the sketch which helps provide a stable frame of reference. The hole feature only sees points in the sketch so the curves are ignored. And you can just use the old hole feature until you get comfortable with the newer one.

As for NX-6 which is as yet unreleased, the snippets of possibly unreliable information that I have seen on here indicate that there may be some new functionality. In fairness that in itself does not mean that existing functionality will change substantially. What is mooted as changing was no more threatening that the interface changes in NX-5 and will probably bring some dialogs as yet unaffected into line with the newer NX-5'ish style. Otherwise it is totally up to you whether you take every second release. Even GM who adopted a somewhat similar policy have decided to take consecutive releases on a couple of occasions perhaps because it just makes sense to get the most our of your maintenance dollar if the benefits justify the upgrade. Whether that tells you the the earlier release was that poor or the later that good may be a toss up. Which is why you pretty much need to judge for yourself rather that perhaps just letting policy guide you.

What I don't expect is that NX-6 will be as poorly received as Windows Vista in that we're unlikely to find ourselves forced to change "for our own good" in the same manner. We had that experience with version 10, but in general it is just not the way of NX to remove functionality from one release to the next. So if there is new functionality it is likely that we will be able to chose whether or not to use it. Mind you I can probably predict now that it won't stop people from complaining that they don't like certain aspects of it, even if they don't have to use it.

There is something of a phenomenon that works against newly released products in the sense in that they get vigorously scrutinized and even older unaltered features attract a fair number of complaints. We observe that with our engineering designs and I'm sure that same would also be true of software. I heard quite a few negatives about every release we ever upgraded to. Human nature is to report a thousand complaints for every complement so you do have to ignore the negatives to some extent.

Best regards

Hudson
 
Hudson

Thank you again for your time and information. I'm going to set up some pretty extensive testing as we are also going to be upgrading to TCE 2007 soon too and hopefully, depending on the outcome roll it out around August time as we need to do install the software during a big shut down.
I have had a good look at NX6 and there is a big difference when compared to NX4, but it does look fantastic!

Regards

Simon
 
Simon,

How did you get to look at NX-6?

Curiously

Hudson
 
Hudson

How does the saying go? it's not what you know, but who you know. Or something like that [noevil]
simon
 
Simon,

TCE 2007, do you mean Teamcenter Engineering 2007 (Teamcenter Engineering 2005 SR1 MP2+) or do you mean Teamcenter 2007? Big difference and curious if you where looking at the Unified platform deployment or not.

Like any version of NX, they fix bugs in newer versions, add more functionality, etc. You pay maintenance for this, and support. They will stop supporting older versions of NX and quite fixing bugs, etc. Large organizations take longer to upgrade due to more dependencies with customizations and other applications. But they still move as quickly as possible even though it is often years to complete.

I would look at the X.0.3.x version of any NX release. That seems to be the most battle tested by other companies. When it reaches this point, the next version of the software is just about out. So you can roll on about the same release schedule as NX but + 1 year. Smaller companies can change probably around 6 months with multiple patches.


-Dave Tolsma
Tolsnet LLC
 
Hudson

we are looking at the unified platform, although I don't have a great deal to do with TCE. I work on the CAD side and there is a team looking after the PLM however there is some cross obviously, but I don't get involved with all the work flows and what have you. I am however quite involved in variant configuration which is a very hot potatoe at the moment which involves all 3 systems (CAD, TCE and SAP)

regards

Simon.
 
Hudson,

NX5 CAM has made some significant changes to the Non-Cutting Moves. Through 5.0.3.2, you will need to pay particular attention when posting legacy operations.

Specialty Engineered Automation (SEA)
a UGS Foundation Partner
 
Simon,

You were probably responding more to Dave than I when it comes to the unified platform aspect. However I can only sympathize with any poor sod having the misfortune to deal with SAP.

Phillip,

Yours confusedly, I didn't comment about CAM was it in response to something else? Anyway yes, so is it a good thing that they changed the CAM or should I tell my mates in the CAM department to proceed with extreme caution?

Regards

Hudson
 
JCBCad:

NX5 is, in my experience, a much better release than NX4 was. The UI is more consistent, and they continue to flush out more and more of the older UG-style dialogues. Many little sketcher quirks have been fixed.

We had a lot of problems with memory access violations in 4 and I really just don't see them anymore.

Ed
 
Acciardi

Thanks for that. We too are constantly battling fatal errors and MAV's. I also think that the fact we are on 64 bit platforms doesn't help as well. I think we were miss sold the system, we bought them due to the fact we could have massive ammounts of memory, to help us when working with our very large assemblies and they have 2 dual core processors, but NX4 is only configured to run on one so we are only using 25% the processing power. Also it is a known fact that NX motion will not run properly on 64 bit platforms and NX human modelling is not supported at all on NX4 64 bit, so we've got state of the art machines that are running on tick over and software that is not fully supported.

Interestingly did you know that when working with assmeblies, you would expect that when you close a sub-assembly you would expect the system to relinquish the memory it used to open that assemblyb - well it doesn't it keeps hold of that chunk of memory in case you decide to open that assembly again and this is why we specced very powerful machines, because we were finding that towards the end of the day, we were running in to swap space and things were taking for ever even just swapping dispayed part. We couldn't understand why, we got UGS (as was) in to look and in some cases closing an assembly used even more memory!!!!!

Anyway I'm off on a tangent, basically I think even though 64 bit machines are not ideal, there are still as you rightly said many more issues with NX4.

regards

Simon
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor