So I have been asked to spec up some new workstations for our R&D dept. We are looking at laptops and desktops. I have been through Anna Woods benchmark tests and found little info on the machines I am looking at.
Just want peoples opinions really, make sure I do not miss anything. Note we are tied to Dell machines so no choice to switch.
Laptop
Mobile Precision M6500 - Core I7 820QM 1.73GHz 8mb quad core
Windows 7 Pro - 64 bit
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Dual channel memory
500GB (7200Rpm) Serial ATA harddrive
1GB Nvidea FX3800M video card
I was initially worried about the processor speed here, but after reading some reviews it looks like it uses "Turbo boost to push the processor up to 3GHz when needed. However I am not sure how this works in reality.
Workstation spec
Dell Precision T7500
1 x Intel Xeon X5570 2.93 GHZ quad core
Windows 7 64 bit
6GB DDR3 1333MHz ECC-RDIMM
160GB (10000 RPM) Sata hardrive
768MB Nvidea FX1800
Our main use is very detailed and complex part modelling, not huge assemblies (<1000 parts), photoworks and FEA, for the FEA machine I am considering 2 x Xeon X5570 processors in one of the machines, however it is going to be difficult to justify the cost.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, as would pointing out any glaring errors I have made.
FEA we do is geerally not too complex, just big parts, usually pushing well over 1million DOF, with Node-Node contacts. At the moment I am setting them up to run overnight, otherwise I am just staring at blank screen.
Will see if we can push these to 12GB RAM. One question, will additional RAM automatically mean we can run a finer mesh overall, ignoring what we can do currently with mesh control?