The Ideal SW Computer

[uGlay]

So the ME's and I are looking to upgrade to something more powerful. Our price range is from $2500 to$ 4000 per computer and we want something aggresive. We are ready to spend a little bit more money so that we have something that wont bog down on big assemblies.

I havent really kept up with computers much but I've seen quad-core and eight-core processors out there. In your opinion, what do you think is the ideal combination for a great solidworks computer?

Processor:
Memory:
Hard Drive:
OS:
Video Card:

We all have 2407WFP screens so we dont need to upgrade monitors. Thanks for your help guise.

 

[Standing]

Processor: quad-core
Memory: 6 GB
Hard Drive: 2 Raid
OS: windows 64 bit
Video Card: Nvidia best you can afford


Bradley
SolidWorks Premim 2007 x64 SP4.0
PDM Works, Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU
3.00 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Virtual memory 12577 MB, nVidia 3400

 

[uGlay]

by 2 RAID i hope you mean 2 TERABYTES lol.

 

[Standing]

I am not sure what “Hard Drive: 2 Raid” means. Our IT guy explained it this way. “2 hard drives, the computer writes to both. So ½ your drawing will be on 1 drive with the other ½ on the other drive.” The disadvantage with this, is if 1 drive fails you lose your drawing. The advantage is that the computer writes twice as fast.

Bradley
SolidWorks Premim 2007 x64 SP4.0
PDM Works, Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU
3.00 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Virtual memory 12577 MB, nVidia 3400

 

[KCobra]

I am looking to upgrade my ME's as well after benchmarking SW2007 on their current machines and other more powerful systems. You can see the results under the Benchmark thread:

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=186991&page=3

Anyways, although not concrete, I think I am settling on a Dell Precision 690-32bit with the following:

2 - Dual Core Xeon 3.00GHz processors
2 - 80GB SATA 10K hard drives in a RAID 0
4GB DDR2 RAM
256MB NVIDIA QuadroFX 3500

And we would get these for just over $4100.00 thru our account with Dell.

I am considering the 64-bit platform, but nothing is certain yet.

I look forward to seeing what others post here.

Good Luck!

 

[CFinley]

Make certain the hard disk drives are SCSI, which are much more reliable that IDE. The SCSI standard is very stringent, and the quality and reliability of the disk drives are greatly increased as a result.......based on experience.

SATA drives have faster thruput than IDE, but not as good as SCSI.

Also, unless you tell DELL or Gateway to put in drives with 3-year warranties (high-grade), they will put in the standard 'junk'.

Better to go with HP/Compaq than Dell or Gateway......we've had much better luck with Compaq than Dell/Gateway.

We LOVE AMD-64, and they perform extremely well, and sometimes better than Intel.

 

[woolly]

Regarding the RAM, the more the better, the same goes for the graphics card, spend as much as you can afford you'll reap the benefits in the long run.

On the Quad / Dual core processor issue, I've spoken directly to a Senior Solidworks development engineer in the UK and he tells me, quad core is a waste of time as SW is a dual core application only, you're better off spending your money on more memory & a faster graphics card.

Hard drives - Definitely Raid 0, and 2 drives if possible.

Processor speed - The faster the better, SW relies on the processor a lot.

Hope this is of some help.

 

[StefanHamminga]

I would have to recommend against SCSI drives for a workstation, in virtually every review the WD Raptors perform better than the top SCSI drives and they come with the same quality/warranty standard. Instead of paying $850 for 2 15k SCSI drives you can get 2 150GB Raptors and a proper Areca 1210 SATA RAID controller for about the same price... Also only use RAID0 if you don't care about data integrety. RAID1 (mirroring) offers nearly the same read performance and the write performance of a single drive (both better with a quality raid controller).

Also check the XI website, they have a watercooled Core 2 Duo running at 3.4GHz... Properly configured that would be a very fast system.

Some other (minor) tips: if you work over a LAN a lot get a workstation with a proper network card (broadcom or intel for example), as saving $50 on a network card can make your $1000 cpu perform like a $250 one...

The FX3500 is still a very good choice I think.

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

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Stefan ... do you have any knowledge/experience with the fibre-optic network cards. Are they substantially better? Worth the extra cost?

 

[botnsnow]

I am actually an IT professional for my summer intern as I am a student in college at the moment. Since our company supports between 30-40 SolidWorks users I peruse these forums to pick up performance tips and fix a few issues that pop up, so feel free to take my advice under your discretion.

Personal experience with fiber optics within an organization: The only really cost effective use of fibre optic networking are backbone lines that exceed the reccommended distance of ethernet. You can pick up a high quality gigabit nic that will provide you with great performance. Your network speed is going to depend much more upon the server os/config/hard drive speed and etc AND the quality of your level 3 devices. Linksys routers/switches will not perform the same as the Cisco name even though both are manufactured by Cisco. Then the network environment is going to come into play be it Citrix, Active directory etc. And then you have network load controlled by your domain architecture, ip subneting, router configuration, and quantity of users. Also the ports on your switch/router need to match the configuration of the nic. After all that you finally get to talk about the NIC.

If you spend the extra couple bucks to get a decent quality 10/100/1000 NIC and your level 3 devices all support gigabit ethernet you will have cost comparable networking. If you want to speed up your network processing have your IT guys give you a direct pipe to your own engineering server(s).

 

[StefanHamminga]

Sorry, no not much, other than that they are very impractical for pc use (the fibre cables need to be kink protected from feet & vacuum cleaners)... IMHO they were never worth the money so I didn't really mess with it. Cards aren't that expensive, but the prices for the nescessairy switches scared me away.

The good I meant was a network card that has (some) offload features, eg: they will handle some calculation work instead of making the CPU do their work. Realtek chips, for instance, are really good at hogging your cpu. Better chips feature (amongst other features) interrupt modulation. Usually the more server oriented NICs have better offload features, some even have a TOE (Tcp/ip Offload Engine) to handle virtually every calculation that is needed to move your data around.

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

 

[botnsnow]

Oops forgot to mention I definitely agree with Stefan about the SCSI. Get a good SATA drive with a decent raid controller and you will outperform the older SCSI technology. Also RAID1 is the way to go when not pulling from a central server. The two most important things in a SW system is the amount of RAM and the best graphics card supported by SW. Of course you need x64 bit architecture. Then you can worry about the processor and write speed. Only catch about RAM, there is usually a current cost effective amount ie 4GB and in 3 months that amount will increase significantly so it is up to your budget to determine the amount of RAM.

 

[mx2street]

The 'christmas system' (the kind designed to scare mgrs into approving the one you actually want) I spec'd out was actually approved for a limited number of people at my site:

2x Xeon 5160 (3.0Ghz)
8GB RAM
Quadro FX 4500
SAS RAID 0 (2x 73GB 15K RPM)
XP-Pro 64-bit

I also threw in a Spacepilot for good measure.

I would suggest checking out Anna's Solidmuse (

http://designsmarter.typepad.com/solidmuse/)

and scroll down for her spreadsheet that has performance details from people that ran her 'punch tool' test. That spreadsheet is the reason that my system got approved.

Tony

HP NW9440
2 GB RAM
Quadro FX 1500M (84.88)
Solidworks 2006 SP5.0
Solidworks 2007 SP4.0

 

[woolly]

We've just recently upgraded one of our latest CAD2 workstations from 4Gb to 8Gb of RAM, we were finding with our very large models the RAM was topping out and the system would hang (in SW drawing mode). Where it was topping out at 2.7Gb used it mow uses 4.3Gb on the same drawing and doesn't fall over.

This is on XP x64, Nvidia FX3500 graphics, dual core 2.67 Ghz processor.

So the more RAM you can afford the better for large models, our supplier told me that is the case until you reach 16Gb and then the performance starts to drop off due to other hardware restrictions.

Woolly

 

[uGlay]

Thanks for your input. i'll take it into consideration.

 

[rockguy]

If your using Cosmos or PhotoWorks along with SW I would still look at the Quad core processors. I just purchased a Dell 390 with a Core 2 Quad and I can't believe how fast this machine renders. Even at the highest possible settings I'm seeing very quick render times. I believe both Cosmos and PhotoWorks will use as many cores available for processing.

With that said, SolidWorks runs great on this machine but I don't notice a performance gain with the quad core over the dual core. If you're only running SW dual core would be money better spent.

Also, check the graphics card specs for SW 2008. Only certain cards are going to give you good realview performance.

Rob Rodriguez CSWP

http://www.axiscadsolutions.com

http://www.robrodriguez.com

http://designsmarter.typepad.com/rob_rodriguez/

Eastern Region SWUGN Representative

http://www.swugn.org

http://www.nvtswug.com

SW 2007 SP 2.0

 

[uGlay]

We dont do photoworks, but we do have COSMOS people in-house that might benefit from that observation.

 

[KCobra]

We bought 7 Precision 490s:

WinXP 64-bit
2 - Quad Core Xeon 2.00GHz
4GB RAM
256MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450
2 - 146GB SAS HDs in RAID 0

Outside of Smarteam causing issues with Solidworks (which was an issue on the old systems), these new machines are much better than what they were using.

 

[eyedol]

Anyone know how the core2duo compares to xeons for solidworks? I'm looking at getting a dell M90 fully decked out and naturally they don't run on xeons.

 

[SBaugh]

well I don't know about that, but I do know that SW is not multi-threaded and it does not take advantage of the Dual\Quad core CPU's out today. Its a great computer don't get me wrong, but don't expect monster improvements because its a dual\quad core CPU... 64-bit, if that is pursued by anyone... don't expect dramatic speed... only speed you will get is from your RAM... if you are exceeding your RAM now then its going to be an improvement, but if your not... I don't think the cost is worth the performance you will get.

PW and Cosmos are the only 21 apps that can take some advantage of the Dual and Quad core Processors... its just core SW and some of the add-ins that are still linear.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

"If it's not broke, Don't fix it!"
faq731-376