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CAD Workstation Purchase
GMGregory McMillan17/03/2010

Hi All,

I’ve been given the green light to purchase a new cad workstation because my old Dell Precision 390 has very poor performance with large assemblies. I currently have:

3GHZ Pentium 4

3 GB Ram

Windows XP Pro 32bit

Nvidia Quadro FX1700 GPU

I’m looking for advice on a good system to purchase based on my requirements. I design large food processing machines so I need something with some horsepower. I will be using this workstation for the following.

Large Assembly Modeling: 15,000 – 25,000 components

Surface Modeling

FEA (Solidworks Simulation)

CFD (Solidworks Flow Simulation)

Photorealistic Rendering Photoworks/Photoview 360

Animation

Motion Simulation

I also keep various applications open for multitasking. I will have these applications open simultaneously:

Solidworks 2010

AutoCad Mechanical 2010

Epicor Vista (ERP)

Outlook

Word

Excel

Web Browser (IE, Fire Fox, Chrome etc.)

Windows Media Player

Photoshop (occasionally)

Illustrator (occasionally)

PowerPoint (occasionally)

Process Explorer

Antivirus (Background)

This is a system I built on Dells site for about $5k

·  Precision T7500 64bit

Date

3/17/2010 4:22:38 PM Central Standard Time

Catalog Number

4 Retail 04

Catalog Number / Description

Product Code

Qty

SKU

Id

Dell Precision T7500:
Dell Precision T7500 Workstation

T7500

1

[224-4856]

1

Operating System:
Genuine Windows® 7 Professional, with Media, 64-bit, English

W7P6E

1

[330-6228][421-1485]

11

Processor:
Quad Core Intel™ Xeon W5590 3.33GHz,8M L3,6.4GT/s,turbo

W5590

1

[317-2540]

2

Memory:
12GB, DDR3 RDIMM Memory, 1333MHz, ECC (6 DIMMS)

12G3E36

1

[317-0318]

3

Hardware Support Services:
3 Year Basic Limited Warranty and 3 Year NBD On-Site Service

U3YOS

1

[992-8522][993-2560][993-8557][993-8578]

29

Graphics:
768MB NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 1800, DUAL MON, 2 DP & 1 DVI

FX1800M

1

[320-7892]

6

Hard Drive Configuration:
C1 All SATA drives, Non-RAID, 1 drive total configuration

SATA1

1

[341-8813]

9

Hard Drive Internal Controller Option:
Integrated LSI 1068e SAS/SATA 3.0Gb/s controller

NSASCTL

1

[341-9290]

24

Boot Hard Drive:
250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache™

250GS

1

[341-8664]

8

DVD and Read-Write Devices:
16X DVD-ROM with Cyberlink Power DVD™

DVD16

1

[313-7458][421-0536]

16

Monitor:
No Monitor

NMN

1

[320-3316]

5

Floppy Drive and Media Card Reader Options:
No Floppy Drive and No Media Card Reader

NFD

1

[341-5255]

10

Resource DVD:
Resource DVD - contains Diagnostics and Drivers

RDVDWD

1

[330-3571]

27

Documentation:
Documentation, English, with 125V Power Cord

DOCENG

1

[330-3156][330-3157]

21

Quick Reference Guide:
Quick Reference Guide, English, Dell Precision T7500

REF

1

[330-3570]

775

Windows 7 Upgrade Program Info:
Windows 7 Upgrade Web Site

WIN7UP

1

[468-3168]

461

Sound Card:
SoundBlaster® X-FI XtremeMusic™ (D)w/Dolby® Digital 5.1

SBXBVI

1

[313-7461]

17

Speakers:
Dell AX210 Speakers

AX210

1

[313-7774]

18

Mouse:
New Dell USB Optical Mouse with scroll, All Black Design

LOB

1

[310-9602]

12

Keyboard:
Dell QuietKey Keyboard

QUSB

1

[330-3203]

4

Ship Packaging Options:
Shipping Material for System

SHIP

1

[330-3569]

40

Power Supplies:
Precision T7500 Power Suppply

SPS

1

[330-3555]

20

I need this machine to last for at 3 years before I can go to the owner for a new one.

Keep in mind time is money. We have a very small engineering department so we are expected to do a lot with very little time and I don’t have time to fight with my computer and deal with slowdowns, crashes, etc.

Thanks in advance,

Greg