Solid Modeling....Need computer buying advice 1

[Barry1492]

I've been moved to a new group where I work and don't have a computer. My boss said to find one less than $5,000 and he'll buy it.......and pretty much left it at that. I've never spent more than $600 on a machine, so I'm kinda in the dark and he's not one to be bombarded with questions.


So, the best I can tell, I'll be working with Solid Works, ProE, Catilia (sp?), and some other solid modeling programs. In addition, we do R&D and take alot of photos. I know that the few guys who work on this stuff don't do it on their own machines because they are too slow and prefer to use some in another office.

Anyway, what kind of stuff should I look for and, even better, specificaly what do you reccomend I get and where?

Thanks alot - Barry

 

[rfus]

Get a Quadro. I'm on a dell precision 360 that I customized and picked up for 3.6K two years ago. With a 5K budget you should be feeling lucky. Listen to what these guys said above, cause I have found when the company gives you a chance to spec out your computer, and you come back in six months telling them you need more, they aren't as eager to fork it out. Get 21" dual monitors, you'll love going into work.

Working with scan data can be extremely CPU and memory intensive, so I'd go with a new 64 bit system that can bring you beyond the 3GB virtual mem switch in windows.

I got a tour of the new microsoft OS 'vista' which microsoft says they want out by november next year. It uses ribbons, has transparent shells, 3d folders that you can zoom in to see metadata, apps no longer will be able to be based on dpi to get ready for running on huge flatscreens, and it has a little bit of a mac feel. my favorite is when you move or copy files you no longer get that stupid flying paper between folders and a time estimate that is never right. Its pretty sweet and I see a huge possibility for solidworks to really capitilize on thier new os.

Mindnumb, I use dual monitors and tried putting everything on the left and the graphics on the right, but I am so used to the way I had set up my toolbars I found it was slowing me down. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance, but I also use Delcam Powermill or Scanning Soft on the right while running SW on the left so it wasn't so conducive to operating both apps with the toolbars in front of the other. I would be interested if you posted a print screen of your setup, or if any of you have a superior setup that you think is the best way to go. Maybe I should start a new thread on this cause I'm kind of off topic, but I think it would be interesting to see the way everyone sets up the GUI for themselves.

RFUS

 

[Mindnumb]

solidmechman: the quadro fx1000 is very good at least for my need. The amount of geometry it can accelerate is huge, I have no exact number of parts tho.. I have tested with piping generated assemblies, gonsisting of some 5 to 10 unique parts, and put them into larger assemblies, with no mates, to get over 5000 parts. Large assembly mode turned off. It turns around quite ok, but I have not made drawings of these assemblies.

A side note... my radeon 9800 card on my 500 MB , 2 Ghz socket A system at home ( softmodded with fireGL drivers ) turns it around a little faster, but that is a single monitor system on 1280x1024 opposed to my 2 x 1600x1200 setup at work.

So... for you guys asking about the geforce cards, and maby the radeon line from ati as well... some of these cards kan be fitted with modified workstation drivers, as the hardware are essentially the same. you have to make thourough invesdtigations to bee sure your card can be modded, but if your in a thight spot economically it would make sense to check it out.

Unmodded standard gaming cards kan be used, but you get issues with decreased performance as the number of windows with assemblies and parts are opened. you will be able to handle quite large assemblies, but only one or two at the time. Also there will be no realview support. there might be other issues with incorrect display of lines and geometry in shaded models or drawings, but the only issue listed on the newest quadro cards aside from no realview support is as follows:

" Limited number of accelerated windows. Amount of video memory determines the number. If 64M - 128M of memory, 3-12 accelerated full screen windows. "

Quote from solidworks website

 

[SBaugh]

If you use an unsupported card or driver, don't complain about the instabity or things you see on your screen. Because it's card that is the problem. I have seen instability and black bars on the screens of those using unsupported cards.

FYI - The only Quadro Card that is not supported is the "NVS" quadro card.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376

 

[Mindnumb]

Yes, Scott is 100% right, please recognize the risk involved with going with
a non professional card. For some users it might be quite all right, but I
suppose you dont get much help with whatewer issues you have from your SW
dealer/support... Quite understandable...

To summarize : non proffesional card = last option.

Lets just hope for a universal high quality 3d Layer to get rid of the
professional type cards all together. Oh happy day

 

[kellnerp]

Gee, $5,000. I spent $4,300 1 1/2 years ago and still have one of the fastest SW machines as measured by benchmarks and real world performance. We just retired a slow Dell 3.4Ghz machine in favor of faster hardware and realized some downsides to Dell. You can't upgrade them. Based on benchmarking AMD 64 is the highest performance system you can get into.

You have to make a critical decision first. Does any of the software you have multitask? SW does not (at least not where it counts). If you don't think you will be running multitasking software go with an AMD64 FX 5x chip. Replace the x with the highest number chip you can afford.

Motherboard. I use ASUS because they are fast and solid. A high end NForce 4 board will do fine. Pay particular attention to memory. Any motherboard has a recommended memory list. Get ECC and registered if you can. Tyan is also good and you can get motherboards that will hold more than 4GB of ram.

Power Supply. I use Antec True Power. This is important. Don't skimp.

Memory. OCZ seems to be the hot item now. Corsair or Mushkin higher end products also work. Again, ECC and registered. Dual Channel. 4GB. Remember you have a 64 bit machine and can use every bit of that if you need.

Hard drive. Forget RAID. Doesn't help performance. A Western Digital Raptor or two is quite sufficient. Comes in 36 and 72 GB varieties.

Graphics. NVidia FX series. Get all you can afford.

Now if you are going multitasking than go with the Opterons. You can get dual core or single core on a multiprocessor motherboard. Let economics determine this. While the plain 4x00 series is fast they aren't as fast as the single core FX5x series. The Opterons are.

Mulitasking motherboard. Get Tyan for the Opterons with PCIe support.

Everything else the same as before.

 

[pdybeck]

Excellent advice kellnerp.

 

[Mindnumb]

I see I made an error in my reply to solidmechman..

I said:

" the only issue listed on the newest quadro cards aside from no realview support is as follows:

" Limited number of accelerated windows. Amount of video memory determines the number. If 64M - 128M of memory, 3-12 accelerated full screen windows. "

Quote from solidworks website"

Replace "Quadro" with "Nvidia gaming" card. sorry .

 

[solidmecman]

yeah I figured that was what you meant because I knew the Quadro cards had realview support and I didn't think they had any limitation to the accelerated windows.

is Realview only used for doing fully rendered animations that are saved to a .avi file?

 

[Heckler]

kellnerp - I believe Seagate hard drives to be the most dependable in the business. I'm driving a Dell 370 and would agree with you on upgradability.

 

[Theophilus]

kellnerp's advice is great--I use a similar such system as he mentioned with Asus and Opterons. Excellent results, stable system.

For what it's worth, I've found this to be a clever way of avoiding down-time and loss of data.

Use two hard drives, not RAID configured--just normal. I prefer SATA, for performance and convenience reasons. Each drive can be swapped on the motherboard to act as the "primary" drive in a pinch.

On each drive, before doing anything else, install your operating system. One is redundant unless you have a drive crash. However, having double installations of your hard drive means virtually no down-time if your system drive crashes or becomes infested with trojans, worms, or other malware. Simply turn off your machine, switch SATA motherboard plugs, and boot on your other hard drive's operating system. From there, you can scan the other drive and properly remove all malware. Shut down and switch back and you're all set to go. If your system drive's operating system is otherwise corrupted, you can at least retrieve data files with no loss of time, since your "data" drive also has an operating system from which you can boot and operate. You cannot employ this method later, since installing Windows will waste whatever is on your drive--so you have to do it from the start.

If you have an entire drive meltdown, enter the other time saving practice. I use a piece of freeware called SyncBack (check out Snapfiles.com ) to copy important data files from one drive to the other (only relevant directories/files are "mirrored") over night. So in case of a drive crash, the most I could lose is a day's work. Monthly (or more often) back-ups are created and cataloged on DVD in case an asteroid hits my office.

I run Seagate and Western Digital. I've never encountered a melted-down Seagate drive, so recommend using them unless your data is completely irrelevant (apply to anyone here? --didn't think so). Each of my drives is fast and has 80GB capacity. Using these practices has kept me from ever losing anything but program/system files--my design files and any other file type I value are always kept intact.


Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reality is no respecter of good intentions.

 

[solidmecman]

another good thing you can do is just use 1 drive, and partition it, and keep all of your documents on a seperate partition. That way if you need to reinstall windows, you just wipe out the c: drive and all of your important data say on the e: drive is just fine, not touched. So you reinstall windows on c: and then you already still have all your data on e:

now if you have an entire drive meltdown this will not help, that's when you NEED dual drives.

I have this cd called UBCD4Win that is great if your OS gets messed up with spyware, etc. Your computer boots into a virtual windows right off of the cd, doesn't use your HD at all, just uses your cd-rom drive and you system ram. Works very well and has helped me fix many issues on my pc before without having to totally reinstall windows.

 

[kellnerp]

Heckler,

I use the Raptor drives because they are fast (fastest) and that precludes the RAID complication. Drive speed doesn't really effect SW performance in any way I can measure though.

 

[Mindnumb]

Realview: I use it a lot to take fast screenshots or save to jpg to give glossy presentations to the sales folks. I do a lot of piping , and with some kind of metallic material on it is the absolute fastest way to get good looking shiny pictures. It lets you see the model with "real" materials without render via photoworks. not the same quality as pw, but you can spin the model around without much of a performance penalty and still see the materials. And the standard materials are quite good looking, so you don´t have to spend much time tweaking settings.

Its Not a must have, but I guess it has given the right wow! factor in a couple of cases. (prowiding a customer with a iso view of a preliminary layout of their pumps/heat-exchangers/ Pipes and a shit-load of valves that actually looks like its all made of steel in a couple of hours after a request somethimes gets the right jaw to drop....)

 

[solidmecman]

so the regular materials you add to parts does not look the same as the realview materials? is there a tutorial on how to use realview now that I finally got myself a quadro card?

 

[ctopher]

If your card supports Realview, you just turn it on. It is in SW Help.

Chris
Systems Analyst
SolidWorks/PDMWorks 05
AutoCAD 05
ctopher's home site (updated 06-21-05)
FAQ559-1100
FAQ559-716

 

[Mindnumb]

Yes wery straight forward, just mess around a little bit with it, an you get the consept.

 

[solidmecman]

well I just went to 'View, Display, Realview graphics' but the 'realview graphics' is grayed out so I can't select it.

I know my card supports it, I have an nVidia Quadro FX 1000

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Have you selected the SolidWorks option in the Aplication Settings of the nVidia card?
(RMB on the nVidia icon in the System Tray)

MERRY CHRISTMAS
(Unabashedly Politically Incorrect)

 

[solidmecman]

yup, sure did, not sure why this option is grayed out, does it have anything to do with the image quality or performance options in solidworks?

 

[StefanHamminga]

A little note on the hard drives, two commonly overlooked features of raid 1:

1. Modern raid 1 implementations read roughly twice as fast as a single disk & write like a single disk.

Since your hard drive write speed (for instance the excellent WD raptor 74GB) is about 80% of your read speed you will get a balance of roughly 1:3.6 (write speed : read speed).
This is very close to the average read / write balance I measure at my old man's company (I do all IT stuff there). I used a couple of tools (system monitor & linux monitoring tools on the server) to measure the amount of data their programs read & write and it seems to float a bit above 1:4 (read bytes / written bytes).

2. How much does it cost to install your pc? is it less than the 50-150 bucks of an extra drive?

My current view is that no office pc currently build should do without at least raid1.

Stefan Hamminga
Mesken BV
2005 Certified SolidWorks Professional
Mechanical designer/AI student