Please recomend me a dual setup for CAD/Rendering

EvilAngel

Gawd
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Jan 9, 2002
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I have a friend that is in need of a dual processor setup but i have zero experience with dual proc. systems.

He would be using the box for CAD, Photoshop and rendering.

AMD or intel is welcome as long as its the best fit for the job. He wants also 2GB of ram.

Thanks in advance,
E.A.
 
I'd probably go dual xeons for cad/cam work. They just have better fpu performance for the most part when it comes to that type of application, 2gigs or more of ram to work with large sets and a nice professional graphics card like a nvidia quadro.
 
Depends if price is a concern or not, or what your limit is. Tell us that and we can write you specs to suite :)

For a simple system, just dual 3.2ghz Xeon or 246 opteron level processors. Tyan motherboard (they make yummy motherboards) and a controller card with Raid-5 or Raid-50 depending on how much storage he requires. Getting 2 gig of ram is easy, just Corsair server made stuff will be fine.

But yeh, tell us the price limit and we'll, or i'll write you some specs.
 
Depends what you use.. I used Inventor 9 and I found that opterons on large scale assemblies with moving parts were sometimes 200% faster then the dual xeon workstation that my co-worker had. Dual opteron also Multitasked way better then the xeon setup. Video cards really didn't help much in rendering since Inventor wasn't vid card dependent..

I was using 4 gigs of ram and I had to use the /3gig switch because some of the assemblies were about 2.9 gigs in size once loaded. I don't recommand raid 5 or 50 to any one doing intensive CAD work because ITS slow. I suggest RAID 0+1 or 10 (4 Drives), the speed difference is HUGE. The writing process is horrendous on RAID 5, especially if you just updated a part of an assembly and you go to close it, its coffee break time.

As far as saying Xeon having a better FPU thats is completly false.. I did a lot of fluid dynamics, as well as stress simulations, even though Inventor is heavily optimzed for Intel Chips the Opterons stomped them into the ground.
 
what about hyperthreading xeons vs opterons? do the 2 virtual cpus make it better? And what program would he be doing the renderings in?
 
Hyperthreading on certain programs that are CAD will actually cause major slow downs. I noticed that Hyperthreading in Inventor slowed it down by a lot. Hyperthreading doe3sn't help if your working on a large data set.
 
I'm using Inventor 9 and I have a big problems with big assembly (5.000 parts). Assembly retrieve not a few minuts! Do you think, that dual Opteron accelerate my work?

Thank's about your answer before!
 
I found that load times were much more dependent on hd speed. I suggest running raid 10 or 0 or raid 0+1. I have a dynamic parts so If I change on part all parts update themselves accordingly I found that Intel cpu's were really slow at that.
 
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