I am going to build my own system here to run Solidworks
2009. That is the program I am mainly using though I do
occasionally use Photoshop and Dreamweaver as well as internet
browsers(duh). I am not doing any high level operations in
photoshop.
Anyhow, my boss said to spec out a system and to keep it around $2000 so this is what I've come up with. I've gone with a quad core AMD processor. I have a lot of brand loyalty with AMD but would be willing to try Intel for this if it would give me a solid performance gain over AMD. Also, I am looking for some advice on whether I should go with a single, dual, or quad core processor as well. Some thoughts on my video card choice would be nice too. Here are my wishlist specs(from Newegg):
CPU: AMD Phenom 9950 BLACK EDITION 2.6GHz Socket AM2+ 140W Quad-Core Processor
Cooling: ASUS Lion Square 92mm Vapo Bearing CPU Cooler
Motherboard: ASUS M3A78-T AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
Video Card: PNY Quadro FX3700 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
Memory: OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V
Hard Drive: 3 Western Digital 160mb 7200rpm Caviar drives. The quantity reflects me throwing the idea around of setting up a RAID. Any ideas on whether this would be beneficial to me? I'm also disappointed that Newegg does not sell any Maxtor drives anymore. I've been buying Maxtor drives for close to 9 years and have only had 1 fail on me(it was 5 years old).
I have the rest of my components spec'd too, but these are the ones that affect Solidworks.
I am planning on running Vista x64 Ultimate Edition. My questions are:
Single, Dual, or Quad core processor? I mainly do assemblies with 10-600 parts. I do not do any surface modeling though I sometimes must use surface modeled parts and imported parts from customers. I occasionally do rendering with photoworks/realview. I do not do simulations.
Should I get 4gb or 8gb of RAM? I want this computer to be fast and lag as little as possible.
Is my video card good? From what I have read online, the FX3700 seems to be a pretty good card. Anyone have experience with these? Know any better ones? I'd like to keep the price of the video card under 1k dollars.
Should I use RAID 0, 1, or not at all? I have an external hard drive that I backup to so using RAID as a backup is not necessary.
Anyhow, my boss said to spec out a system and to keep it around $2000 so this is what I've come up with. I've gone with a quad core AMD processor. I have a lot of brand loyalty with AMD but would be willing to try Intel for this if it would give me a solid performance gain over AMD. Also, I am looking for some advice on whether I should go with a single, dual, or quad core processor as well. Some thoughts on my video card choice would be nice too. Here are my wishlist specs(from Newegg):
CPU: AMD Phenom 9950 BLACK EDITION 2.6GHz Socket AM2+ 140W Quad-Core Processor
Cooling: ASUS Lion Square 92mm Vapo Bearing CPU Cooler
Motherboard: ASUS M3A78-T AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
Video Card: PNY Quadro FX3700 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
Memory: OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V
Hard Drive: 3 Western Digital 160mb 7200rpm Caviar drives. The quantity reflects me throwing the idea around of setting up a RAID. Any ideas on whether this would be beneficial to me? I'm also disappointed that Newegg does not sell any Maxtor drives anymore. I've been buying Maxtor drives for close to 9 years and have only had 1 fail on me(it was 5 years old).
I have the rest of my components spec'd too, but these are the ones that affect Solidworks.
I am planning on running Vista x64 Ultimate Edition. My questions are:
Single, Dual, or Quad core processor? I mainly do assemblies with 10-600 parts. I do not do any surface modeling though I sometimes must use surface modeled parts and imported parts from customers. I occasionally do rendering with photoworks/realview. I do not do simulations.
Should I get 4gb or 8gb of RAM? I want this computer to be fast and lag as little as possible.
Is my video card good? From what I have read online, the FX3700 seems to be a pretty good card. Anyone have experience with these? Know any better ones? I'd like to keep the price of the video card under 1k dollars.
Should I use RAID 0, 1, or not at all? I have an external hard drive that I backup to so using RAID as a backup is not necessary.
Also, it sounds like your best bet is the fastest dual core processor you can afford, with 4GB ram. You will not notice a great enhancement from the 4-core. Also, you can always upgrade RAM later, it only gets cheaper over time, and is easy to upgrade.
Check out Anna's benchmark for the difference in speed between Intel and AMD:
http://spreadsheets.google.com...z7wTpIkC7LA28ybEyxyTPw
The Nehalem processors sound good, but I'd rather not go with a cutting edge product like that until it's had time to be tested by everyday users.
My boss would like me to try and upgrade only every 2 years or so if possible so I'm trying to put together a system that will last that long. Perhaps my next upgrade will be with Nehalem processors.
My max assemblies are around 1500 components.
I do very little with photoworks and cosmos.
I'd vote for the setup with the better video card.
If you're going with 64bit, I'd just put the extra RAM in now because its so cheap.
Your choice of PSU is a great one. I have that PSU, and it's perfect. It's single rail too.
Personally, I'd say Raid0 seeing as you have a back-up system in place. Raid0 is the best performer. People will agrue that...for some reason they always do. You only need 2 drives for raid0 by the way.
Good choice on video card in my opinion.
Make sure to read reviews on your ASUS mobo. I am an ASUS fan, but they are slipping in quality lately. Buy a stable board, not a gamer (cutting edge) board. With that being said, as long as the reviews are good, go for it.
If I can recommend a case, this one is absolutely amazing in all aspects...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...9-025-_-Product
Good luck,
Should I go with an Intel chip since they seem to have faster processor speeds and FSB speeds?
We do a lot of GotoMeeting sessions with customers all over the country and I'm tired of my solidworks jerking around on my screen while trying to show them the fixture we are designing. Working with large assemblies with my current system(an M90 Precision laptop, 2.33 ghz dual-core, FX2500 graphics, 2gb RAM) can be annoying with rebuilds taking as long as 2 minutes on one project I was doing. Granted, it was the largest assembly I've ever done and it had very little sub-assemblies in it.
As with AMD, I have a lot of brand loyalty with ASUS. I've put ASUS boards in a few of my own systems not to mention every single system I've built for others. Haven't had a single problem yet. My home computer has a gigantic HD 2900PRO video card which would have been resting on the northbridge heatsink on all the ASUS boards I looked at so I went with a Biostar board. It is the only computer system I've ever built that I don't like.
The processor(and of course, the MB with it) are the only things I'm undecided on at this point.
Right now a dual Core 2 Duo at the highest available clock speed is the best CPU for basic SW. Quad cores if you use PhotoWorks or Cosmos. Xeon are designed for servers and you won't see any advantage using them for SW.
I am an Intel person as far as brand goes, so I would recommend intel. That's a personal prefrence only and that's why I didn't mention it. I feel that it's a better choice personally.
I too have built many computer over the years, and almost all we on ASUS motherboards. My latest build was on an ASUS Maximus Formula, and it was very fussy. I did all my homework, and have a rock stable system, but I can tell you that it's a real fussy board. For me, it works fine but I got little tastes of the issues that everybody was complaining about on the ASUS forum. I consider myself highly skilled at this stuff, and I think ASUS is losing their edge. I wasn't trying to say not to buy ASUS, but to be real careful. You are in a work environment, and that's why I recommended a stable board, and research.
Stick with the Core2 platform unless you need MORE than 8GB RAM. The 3.16GHz Core2 outperforms the 3.33 GHz Xeon 5260 and is MUCH less expnsive. See http://www.spec.org/gwpg/apc.d...c_sw2007_summary.html. Compare results in SECONDS not in the weighted scores.)
Get a quad core IF you do lots of rendering or FEA, otherwise stick with dual core
I'd also recommend the FX1700. There's no definitive evidence showing that the FX3700 is faster when running actual SolidWorks models and SolidWorks software.
http://www.tomshardware.com/re...rkstation,1995-12.html
I've seen the tomshardware article, too. Still, I've seen some other benchmark results that indicate a slight advantage for the 1700 over the 570 (there are two systems on Anna's puncholder results sheet - one has a 3.1GHZ CPU and the 570 and the other has a 3.0 GHZ processor and the 1700 - the 1700 equipped system is ever so slightly faster. That may be due to entirely different factors, though.)
Also, the SPECapc benchmark is typically run with RealView turned off. I'd expect the 1700 to perform at least a little better on large assemblies with RealView turned on. Don't have actual proof of that, but the 1700 isn't super expensive.
In any case, if I had to choose between a faster CPU -or- a faster graphics card, I'd pick the faster CPU.
BTW, 3dprofessor.org has some benchmarks comparing SPECapc performance with the new Velociraptor hard drive vs a top-of-the-line 7200 rpm unit. Overall performance is 7% faster with the Velociraptor. This was true on both the Core2 and Skulltrail (same as Xeon) platforms.
Good stuff. Yeah - I would also take the savings from a 1700 to a 570 and apply to a faster CPU and/or more/faster RAM. I am interested in seeing performance numbers from systems with Solid State Hard Drives. Their read and write speeds are starting to look really impressive. I would think the best performance would be with an SSD. I would consider my next purchase to have a small 32 or 64GB SSD for the OS and applications and a larger spinning platter based hard drive for data storeage.
nVidia Product Comparison
CASE a place to call home, built like a tank, mega space and cooling, but dump the power supply.
Power Supply a workhorse heart is important
Motherboard a strong backbone a must
RAM the blood of the system
CPU a solid brain
Video good vision is key
Hard-Drive a reliable place to store my junk
DVD Burner a good place to backup
about $1980
Most of the parts you've linked to are great, but a few are overkill. The DDR3 and motherboard are too overpriced for the small % performance gain. I'd stay with a DDR2 system which will save at least $150 on the mobo and another $80 or more on the RAM. As for the power supply, unless you're building an extreme gaming computer for dual video cards, an 860W PS with a 64 amp, 12V rail is overkill. The 610W version of the PC P&C power supply is more than sufficient - and is $130 less. Finally, the FX 3700 is nice, but having personally tried both the FX570 and the FX1700 - and couldn't notice a performance difference between the two with SW - I'd have a really hard time spending $840 for the FX3700 when the FX570 at $180 would work for probably 95% or more of the SW users out there. If it were me, I'd take the savings above and splurge on the E8600 cpu .
Just my $.02 worth.
Bill
Glad you posted that, by comparing the 570 to the 1700 benchmark wise, it seems the best choice is the 570, that just cut my new setup by $300
Compare
COOLERMASTER, HAF 932 (RC-932-KKN1-GP) Black Tower Case, EATX, No PSU, Steel
CORSAIR, CMPSU-750TX TX Series Power Supply, 750W, 80 PLUS®, 24-pin ATX12V EPS12V, Multi-GPU Ready
INTEL, DX48BT2, LGA775, Intel X48, 1600MHz FSB, DDR3-1600MHz 8GB /4, PCIe x16 CF /2, SATA 3.0 Gbit/s RAID 5 /6, HDA, GbLAN, FW /2, ATX, Retail
INTEL, Coretm 2 Quad Q9550 Quad-Core 2.83GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB (2 x 6MB) L2 Cache, 45nm, 95W, EM64T EIST VT XD, Retail
ZALMAN, CNPS9500 Copper CPU Cooler, Socket 775, No LED
OCZ, 8GB (4 x 2GB) Platinum Edition PC3-10666 DDR3 1333MHz CL (7-7-7-20) 1.8V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC
PNY Quadro FX3700 512MB 256-Bit PCI-E x16 2.0 GPU
Quantity 2 WESTERN DIGITAL, 150GB (WD1500HLFS) WD VelociRaptortm, SATA 3 Gb/s, 10000 RPM, 16MB cache
ASUS, DRW-2014L1T Black/White 20x DVD±R/RW Dual-Layer Burner w/ Lightscribe, SATA, Retail
ROSEWILL, RCR-102 Black 52-in-1 Card Reader/Writer Drive, 3.5" Bay, USB 2.0
BELKIN, F5D7000 Wireless G Desktop Card, IEEE 802.11g 54Mbps, PCI
MICROSOFT, Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition w/ SP1, OEM
After shipping and testing, the system comes out to about $3300.
I've been entertaining the idea of getting a cheaper graphics card but as a previous poster pointed out, having the 256-bit memory interface will be nice. I need this computer to last atleast a couple of years and the motherboard will support 1600ghz FSB and DDR3-1600 memory so when prices come down on those, I can upgrade to a better cpu and RAM. My only problem with the build is that it is a Crossfire board, not SLI, but then I haven't ever planned on running more than one GPU anyway.